An Interview with Alison Bechdel
LEAH PRICE: Of all the bookshelves I’ve seen for this project, yours are the most obsessively organized. Their arrangement juxtaposes the high and the low, the ephemeral and the scholarly, but there’s nothing haphazard about the efficiency with which you have categorized, for example, “tits and clits” in one box and “misc. boy” in another. Does this extend to the way you organize your other possessions? Do you color-code your spices, alphabetize your socks?
ALISON BECHDEL: It’s ironic that I categorize my library so rigidly because I’ve often griped about the way my own work gets pigeonholed in bookstores. My Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon books tend to end up in the LGBT Studies section instead of in Humor or Graphic Novels. And my memoir Fun Home might be anywhere. In one big chain store, I was disappointed not to find it in the graphic novel section—but then I found it in New Biography, and was delighted to see it being treated as a regular, nongraphic book.
I was at a younger friend’s house recently and noticed that she had fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels all shelved together in alphabetical order by author. This seemed like a very evolved way of doing things, and made me feel sheepish about the way I’ve ghettoized my own collection of comics and graphic novels. Yet I don’t feel quite ready to abandon all categories.
My library starts with fiction in the living room. Then the shelves jump up to the landing of the stairs and continue with memoir, autobiography, some random nonfiction and anthologies. Then comes art theory, cultural criticism, film and lit crit, linguistics, psychoanalysis, mythology, philosophy, religion. I used to connect these books like Legos in a particular progression that felt like a model of my intellectual framework—my interest in how words and pictures work together, how stories and ideas inform each other. Barthes’s Image, Music, Text was the keystone holding it all up. It felt very helpful to have this little schema that I could adjust and rearrange as my thinking evolved.
Next comes my small current affairs and political science section, then feminism. Upstairs is my fairly extensive queer theory/LGBT studies section. This had gotten way out of control in recent years: a jumble of history, theory, art, sex, lesbian, gay, and transgender stuff. It was impossible to find anything. Then I had the brilliant idea to organize it all by publication date. Not only can I find things instantly now, but the spines create a curiously eloquent timeline of the Zeitgeist over the past thirty years—from Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation (1973) to When Gay People Get Married (2009). I mean, really: what more is there to say?
You have an elaborate bookstand, one that seems designed to facilitate writing in tandem with reading. How and how much do you mark up your books, pencil, sticky note, highlighter, bus ticket? Are there books in which you wouldn’t write?
Actually, I got that industrial strength Atlas Ergonomic Bookstand to facilitate reading in tandem with eating. I got tired of trying to prop a book open and use a knife and fork at the same time.
But I am in fact an excessive marker-up of books. I don’t feel like I’ve quite made a book my own until I’ve bespangled it with Post-its, illuminated it with at least three different colors of highlighters, and scrawled lots of question marks and exclamation points all over the place. I do lend my books out, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating.
I can’t bear losing a volume, though, and I keep track of what goes out. In my senior year of college I let a friend borrow my Symbolic Logic textbook. We fell out of touch, and for twenty years, I missed that book almost every day. I was sure it would clarify so many of my murky, half-formed ideas. Then several years ago I ran into that old college friend! I felt a little churlish for asking, but she still had the book, and she agreed to return it to me. Getting it back gave me a profound sense of peace, but of course I haven’t looked at it since.
How far back does your collection stretch? When were the first books that you still own acquired? At what age did you start buying books? Which ones have you kept, and shed, as you moved? At what phases of your existence has reading books, and owning books, been most important to you? Have there been periods of your life when you stopped reading?
Mad magazine used to advertise paperback cartoon collections—Son of Mad, Self-Made Mad, Howling Mad, The Indigestible Mad—and I started sending away for them when I was eight or nine. Sadly, these have all disappeared along the way somewhere. The next thing I remember buying for myself was an 1898 edition of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary in a used book shop the summer I was seventeen. I’ve always been partial to dictionaries. In college I was lured into the Quality Paperback Book Club by their offer of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary for fifty cents. It was well worth the additional hundreds of dollars I spent on books I didn’t want before I figured out how to cancel their automatic monthly shipments.
Once, in my twenties, I read an article about how all our paperbacks would start disintegrating in fifteen years or so. That disturbed me, but I couldn’t afford hardcovers. And now, of course, it turns out the article was right. All my old paperbacks are falling apart. I just had to throw out completely pulverized copies of Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina. I wish I’d thought to put them in the compost heap—they would surely have yielded some inspiring vegetables.
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten? Which of your books are the most important to you? Which are the ones you miss the most when you’re away from home?
I picked Rich, Freud, Sontag, and Barthes because they were so influential to me in my youth, and had such a profound effect on my thinking as a feminist, as an autobiographer, and as a visual storyteller.
When my father explained Roget’s Thesaurus to me, it was like he’d unlocked the universe. I can’t write without this book. In fact, it’s a sign that I’ve finally begun concentrating when I have to get up and consult the thesaurus. I don’t use it just for synonyms, but to help me think through ideas, to find a word that serves as a stepping-stone to another word that will send me off in a new direction.
I can hardly speak about To the Lighthouse. Every time I reread it, I discover a new level of meaning that I wasn’t equipped to understand before. Like I’m growing into it or along with it, as if it’s a friend or lover I’m traveling through life with.
The Unstrung Harp is an illustrated story about an author writing and publishing his biennial novel. One of my favorite panels is when Mr. Earbrass goes tearing through his library in the middle of the night for some lines of poetry. “His mind’s eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago.”
I don’t actually own the edition of The Price of Salt that I’ve drawn here. My copy is a very dull looking feminist reprint from the eighties. But if I can ever afford to collect rare books, this one’s at the top of my list.
It’s a lesbian romance that Patricia Highsmith wrote in 1952. Her first book, Strangers on a Train, was a creepy suspense novel with a homoerotic subtext that got made into a Hitchcock film in 1951. She didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a lesbian writer, so she published the romance under a pseudonym. It didn’t really take off until it was published in paperback, though, with this racy pulp-fiction cover.
It’s a heartbreaking book—it’s not just the first homosexual love story to have a happy ending, but it feels to me like a glimpse of an intact part of Highsmith that wasn’t able to survive in a hostile world. Instead, she spent her life writing creepy suspense novels with homoerotic subtexts like Strangers and her famous Ripley series. Actually, repressed homosexual love seems to be a theme among the books I’ve listed here.
Always, Rachel is a collection of the correspondence between Rachel Carson and her close friend Dorothy Freeman. It begins when they first meet, and it’s immediately clear that they’ve fallen madly in love. But Freeman is married and Carson is too busy to have a relationship even if she knew—and was able to accept—that she was a lesbian. The chief charm of The Dharma Bums for me, likewise, is the frustrated and unspoken romantic love that Jack Kerouac clearly feels for Japhy Ryder—the thinly disguised Gary Snyder. If this had been open or acted upon, their back country bodhisattva adventures would somehow be not quite as compelling.
Temperamentally, are you a pack rat or a toss rat? Do you store other kinds of media, cassette tapes, LPs, CDs, or do you download and discard? How do you dispose of the books you don’t want, donating, recycling, putting out on the curb …? Do you have any taboo against throwing away books when you’re done reading them, or replacing books when they fall apart from wear and tear?
I rarely throw anything away. I did sell most of my LPs and my turntable back in the eighties, and have regretted it ever since. So now I try to hang onto stuff, but I’m very troubled by my extensive collection of obsolete media, and I’m frustrated that most of my digital archive is essentially inaccessible to me—for example, my early AOL e-mails. I keep hoping a passionate archivist will develop some kind of Rosetta Stone application to decipher all these obsolete applications.
What do you imagine your library looking like five, ten, twenty years from now? Do you think you’ll still own objects made of paper and glue? And, with apologies for a morbid question, do you ever think about what will happen to your library after your death?
Unless I die very soon, which is of course entirely possible, I’m afraid my shoddy paperback library will decompose before I do.
MarthaM Freeman, ed. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964; The Story of a Remarkable Friendship
Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums
Adrienne Rich On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978
Susan Sontag On Photography
Claire Morgan The Price of Salt
Sigmund Freud Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Roget’s Thesaurus of Words and Phrases
Roland Barthes Roland Barthes
Hergé Tintin in Tibet
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
Edward Gorey The Unstrung Harp; or Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel
