Alison Bechdel.

• Author: Sorensen, Jen
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the legendary comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and the bestselling graphic memoir Fun Home, has been traveling the country in support of her latest book, Are You My Mother? The new memoir, recently released in paperback, delves into Alison's complex relationship with her mother, frequently invoking the writings of Virginia Woolf and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

I spoke with Alison via Skype one afternoon in early April, catching her at home in Vermont during a brief lull between trips to San Francisco and Montreal. We'd exchanged e-mails in the past, but had never met or talked to one another. Despite her busy schedule, she chatted with me for upward of an hour, sounding more relaxed than the nerve-wracked portrayal of herself in her autobiographical comics.

Q: Your schedule sounds pretty hectic. Alison Bechdel: Yeah, it is! It's crazy. I accept that this is what you have to do in this day and age to promote a book, and I'm lucky to get invited to do this stuff, but it's still a huge drain.

Q: You drew Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-five years, which is a good, long run for an alternative strip. Now that you've moved on to graphic novels, do you miss it? Is the lack of a regular deadline a blessing or a curse?

Bechdel: It's both. I wouldn't go back to those deadlines; they were really starting to crush my soul. But I do miss the sense of achievement.

Q: There is something nice about getting your work out there on a regular basis. At the same time, I've always thought it would be kind of a luxury to have all that time to make something perfect.

Bechdel: When I was writing my first memoir, Fun Home, I was also doing the comic strip, and having that other, constant pull on me to do something else was very motivating. I was so eager to get the comic strip done so I could get back to the memoir, and then I could leave the memoir to go back to the comic strip. My second memoir, the book about my mother, I didn't have that other thing, and I got kind of stuck. I think it helps to have at least two things going on.

Q: That's how my chores get done.

Bechdel: Yeah, it's like a kind of transitive procrastination.

Q: Dykes to Watch Out For was often highly political. In addition to featuring a cast of lesbian characters (which was political in itself), those characters frequently discussed the issues of the day. I recall a good deal of criticism of the George W. Bush Administration. Since then, you've...