KATIE ROIPHE
Alison is one of the most exciting, innovative, and interesting writers today. I’m thrilled to be here, as many people will have suspected from my near-fawning New York Times review of Are You My Mother? The editors were like, “This is too much.” So, aside from that somewhat undignified review, it seems that people love this book in an unusual way, and I want to delve into that, the why’s and the how’s of that.
ALISON BECHDEL
I just today read this very interesting review of the book by Heather Love. Do you know her? She’s an academic. She thinks the book itself is a transitional object. In Are You My Mother? I write about Donald Winnicott’s idea of how teddy bears or blankets function as transitional objects for kids, and Love made this funny case that the book itself was a transitional object for me, I guess.
KATIE ROIPHE
Perhaps she meant for readers as well. It’s interesting that they should have such a strong identification with this book. The story you’re telling is so quirky, so idiosyncratic, so specific, so unique to you—and yet even people who didn’t have that kind of mother, but still had some other kind of difficult mother, somehow really “identify,” though this word is too simple to describe for how they feel about it. Do you think your book has helped them to look at their experience in a different way?
ALISON BECHDEL
I feel sort of like a therapist lately. I’m getting all these really intense emails from people. I had that same experience after writing Fun Home—people would come up to me and say, “Oh, this is just like my family.” Then they would proceed to describe a family nothing like mine. I came to think that it was just the act of telling the truth about a family, or revealing family secrets, that people found empowering or exciting. I knew that my story in Fun Home was highly personal and idiosyncratic. Since people seemed to relate anyhow, I got emboldened to push it even further in this book about my mother. I think it is a very deeply strange book.
KATIE ROIPHE
A lot of people tell the truth about their families in memoirs, in novels. I think it must be something about the way you tell the truth about your family.
ALISON BECHDEL
You don’t think it’s just because I have archival backup, like diary entries and newspaper clippings?
KATIE ROIPHE
That is quite interesting, but maybe it’s partly that you’re writing in your own reluctance. You write the whole process you go through. You’re writing into it the difficulty, which I don’t think is very common, and the kind of guilt, and the whole tormented compulsion.
ALISON BECHDEL
I tried to do that and I wonder if in this book about my mother, which ultimately became about writing the book, if that wasn’t maybe a little too much.
KATIE ROIPHE
You have this great quote from Virginia Woolf. After she wrote To the Lighthouse, she says, “I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I expressed some very long-felt and deeply felt emotion, and in expressing it, I explained it, and then laid it to rest.” Did you, too, feel this way after writing this book, like you resolved it?
ALISON BECHDEL
Not at all. I’d hoped that I’d make that happen. Yet, what I learned with my book Fun Home is that books aren’t really over when they’re over. They keep living in the world, and people’s responses change. My family’s reactions change with time, and maybe at some point I will feel that kind of cathartic release from my mother’s constant critical presence in my head, but it has not happened. It’s been a little heightened, if anything.
KATIE ROIPHE
Heightened? You still hear her say it, or you just have it in your head?
ALISON BECHDEL
Both. She reads book reviews all day, and she’s always excited when she sees a bad one of something. She’s got to tell me about it, and I always feel like there’s some little implicit message there for me, like, “Be careful.” Although when I did actually get a bad review, she was irate on my behalf.
KATIE ROIPHE
So much of this book is about her reaction to this book that it almost feels like we know her reaction to this book. But did she actually give you a satisfying reaction?
ALISON BECHDEL
No. She’s maddening. One thing that I really wanted to achieve in this book was to let my mother know how much I loved her. You’d think a person might respond to that by saying, “Thank you,” or, “God, that was so moving.” I got none of that. I know that she’s happy, but only because I know her strange ways: when she’s not saying something, I know what she’s thinking.
KATIE ROIPHE
Once, my older sister—who’s also a writer—said to me that our whole careers could be reduced to those drawings you hang on the refrigerator with magnets when you were a child. And while I resisted this interpretation at the time, it was kind of true. You just want your mother to say that what you did is the most brilliant piece of work, and whatever everyone else says is irrelevant. The New York Times … who cares?
ALISON BECHDEL
Totally. Your mother would actually do that, though, right?
KATIE ROIPHE
Yeah, my mother puts all the books on the refrigerator with magnets. She might even overmagnetize books, one could argue. But that moment where you’re looking for that response and you don’t get it is complicated.
ALISON BECHDEL
I write to get from other people the response I didn’t get from her. But you are a very prolific writer, and you didn’t have that problem. I always think people write out of some deep lack.
KATIE ROIPHE
If you had just this totally well-loved, well-nurtured childhood would you have been that writer, or have been that child creating that beautiful office that you draw with the Dr. Seuss Plexiglas?
ALISON BECHDEL
I think I would be a lawyer now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I think that I would just probably not have this anxiety that’s always making me make things.
KATIE ROIPHE
As a parent, even if you give your children all the love, they’re still going to be tormented and remember that one time you didn’t go to their comedy show. You never make your child that secure that they can’t become some sort of writer or artist.
ALISON BECHDEL
That’s probably true.
KATIE ROIPHE
A lot of the book is about guilt, and writing about your family and grappling with both the compulsion to fight it and the shady impulse, but then the guilt about it. When you finished the book, did you stop feeling guilty?
ALISON BECHDEL
No. I have been racked with guilt and shame ever since I got my copy in the mail. It’s been really awful. I had a hard time writing the book. I was very miserable writing it, and I thought I would be released from it when it was published, but it didn’t happen. When I got the book I found a billion little tiny mistakes, tiny drawing errors that haunted me. But we don’t care about that. Also, I felt I had exposed my mother in a way that she was not really completely on board with.
KATIE ROIPHE
In the final scene you, almost brutally, anatomize all these things that were wrong with the way your mother mothered. And yet, you really generously come out of that, with her having taught you somehow to be an artist. She gave you the way to escape this difficult situation.
ALISON BECHDEL
In many ways my mother kind of threw me overboard, but then she threw me this lifesaver. I feel ridiculous complaining about my mother. She was a pretty good mother. Well, maybe she wasn’t. It’s such a huge taboo to say anything bad about your mother.
KATIE ROIPHE
Maybe this is what readers are identifying with. She wasn’t the worst mother in the world. But, she didn’t give you something you really needed. Your mother is like the weather. It’s like a storm, a tornado. Perhaps the universal thing here is how those little ways in which someone is a terrible mother hugely affect you. This is something that Winnicott also discusses.
ALISON BECHDEL
He also talked about the “good-enough mother,” and most people are so. Certainly my mother was, or I would be psychotic, and I’m not. Pretty much.
KATIE ROIPHE
Are You My Mother? has a lot of scenes in a shrink’s office, there’s a lot about the person trying to write it, and also a lot about, “How does she really feel about her mother?” Though there are stories in it, the book has so many internal states of mind, parts where nothing at all happens. I’m interested to know how you get those complex internal states on the page. Also, I was thinking about what would this book be without pictures. There are things accomplished in this memoir that you couldn’t do if you just had words. How do pictures free you and what do they allow you to do?
ALISON BECHDEL
I feel the reason I am a cartoonist, and why I write visually, is because if I could show you pictures now, I would explain myself better. I can’t really think without pictures, and so I will show you some. [Shows a page from the book.] In this scene, I looked at the childhood drawing. I’m examining it, and it reminded me of an illustration in a kids’ book. The image keeps leading me. I went and found the picture in the Dr. Seuss book, and, here’s the page. I’m looking for this KEEP OUT sign, so I find a picture of the sign. In the text on this page, Dr. Seuss is talking about a Plexiglas dome, which is a phrase I used with my first good therapist to describe my mother’s absence and distance. She was sitting in plain sight in the living room, but you couldn’t talk to her because she had what seemed like a Plexiglas dome over her head, so I was surprised to find that word in this potent childhood picture book.
As I thought about the Dr. Seuss drawing and looked at it more, I realized it was like a womb. Then I was able to make an analogy to an actual fetus, to me inside of my mother. And this is what that looks like on the page of the book. These images are all linked in a kind of argument, like it’s an essay, but the connecting things are images.
KATIE ROIPHE
Finding this thing that leads you to another association is sort of Proustian. If you had an essay, there would be like a million transitions, because we’re going from Winnicott to Virginia Woolf to Dr. Seuss. Those transitions would kill you.
ALISON BECHDEL
Sometimes I feel like I could have used more transitions. Sometimes I go back and look at this book and it feels like it’s filled with non sequiturs, like it needed a little more something. Of course, I’m not the most accurate or objective reader. I don’t have enough distance.
KATIE ROIPHE
Part of what the sheer fact of a picture allows you to do is a kind of simultaneity that cannot be achieved with words. We have to read these in order, one after another, as one does. With pictures and words, and quotes, it’s different. In that amazing Dr. Seuss page, you have many different things going on simultaneously, that you telegraph to the reader in this incredibly graceful way. There aren’t sixteen thousand people doing what you do. You’ve created or invented this form that allows for connections that I think are true to life. Like you’re sitting there with your girlfriend, and you’re having another thought, but how do you show that, if you’re doing it in prose?
ALISON BECHDEL
When I first started my book Fun Home, I was working with a word processing program, just writing down ideas. I didn’t know how else to begin. But I couldn’t really get anywhere. I would write and write, and I would hit a dead end. Then I started writing in a drawing program, Adobe Illustrator, and I started to see the page as a two-dimensional field. I visualized where pictures would go and where things would be linked or juxtaposed. But then what happens when I’m just trying to write a sentence—like, if I get asked to do something simple like write a blurb for a book—every sentence or word that I write, I feel like I could go off in eighteen different directions from there. I think that a lot of people feel that way. It’s a kind of attention deficit disorder or something. Very good gifted writers can do that just with prose, but in my case pictures enable me to do several things at once, and that’s what I’m trying to do.
KATIE ROIPHE
Writers can do it, but it’s more clunky.
ALISON BECHDEL
Or it comes across as more experimental. Whereas this, I think this combination with pictures and words is fairly accessible.
KATIE ROIPHE
There’s a scene in the book where you’re talking to your mother about something important and she’s going on about the plumber and the pipes. There’s something about this way of representing what’s going on in your head, and its contrast, that one can’t do in prose in quite the same way. Is there something about this medium that you’ve created that lends itself to the way people think or remember? Perhaps this is why people identify with your books? Is there something you’re capturing about the way actual memory works and the way a family works? Like, you’re thinking this, but you’re saying this, in a very graphic way.
ALISON BECHDEL
I don’t know a lot about neuroscience. For some reason, I find all that kind of boring. Does memory function in a purely visual way? I don’t know, but I feel it’s a way to access stuff in a deep, immediate way. It took me a long time to get comfortable with a way of drawing my family members. It was hard to do, but just the simple act gave me a weird kind of access to them. Having to externalize them, to draw them, to touch them, was kind of interesting.
KATIE ROIPHE
It’s almost hard to see your parents, actually, hard to see what they look like, because you have so many fantasies and weird feelings about them that you don’t see them. As a child what your parents look like is very confusing.
ALISON BECHDEL
Plus they’re changing anyhow.
KATIE ROIPHE
And you have a huge stretch of time. So you had trouble finding them, but then you found them.
ALISON BECHDEL
I found a way to draw them, a shorthand that seemed to resonate.
Going back to your question about the internal states of mind, I think comics traditionally have been very action-oriented. They are perfectly designed for that, in the same way film is. You see stuff happening. But in a movie, except in a weird experimental one, it’s harder to get the same sense of interiority, or immersion in a person’s consciousness. I’ve been trying to get comics to go more inside, to be able to convey subjective experience more.
When comics first started getting taken seriously, Charles McGrath wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine about how comics can be literature. He said that one thing comics aren’t great at is lyrical emotion, or nuanced feelings. I forget how he put it, but I felt kind of excited by that. I took it as a challenge. I thought I wanted to figure out how to make comics do that.
KATIE ROIPHE
I don’t think a lot of people would be able to read a book that had all this Winnicott and all this Virginia Woolf and was so thinky, except that you brought this dynamic form to it. Maybe you brought a little of the Superman to the psychological struggle. The comic seems to have brought action to the externalization of interior states. It would be harder if you tried to write this in prose. Because how much can we read about someone sitting in the psychiatrist’s office? You nevertheless managed to bring action to a subject that doesn’t inherently have it. Perhaps the form is what brought this kind of Superman-jumping-over-tall-buildings to this subject and made it dynamic, and, as you said, accessible.
ALISON BECHDEL
Maybe I did. I like that.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
I’m curious to hear a little more about how you start writing something. Do you visualize it first? Is it like a story? What does it look like? Then, in terms of your process of creating, is it a visual process of drawing something out, or it’s more about thinking it through?
ALISON BECHDEL
With Adobe Illustrator, I have a little grid. It’s a template, where I can make any combination of panel outlines, so I’m already thinking about what the page is going to look like. I can just start typing on the page. I draw a little text box and start typing with my digital font. It’s really a wonderful, flexible way to write. I can change the layout really quickly without having to erase stuff or throw it away.
I’m always thinking very much about the space of the page. There’s always a battle between the words and the pictures. This sentence here would be fine, if I were writing prose, but, if I can make it a little shorter, I can get an extra eighth of an inch for the drawing. As I’m writing, I’m also thinking about what’s going to go in these boxes. I’m not just like making random choices. I can’t even explain what I’m thinking. I somehow know there’s going to be a picture there, and I have a rough idea of what it is, but I don’t actually draw it. I might do little sketches.
Then I print that page out. Once I get it written to my satisfaction, I start sketching right on the page; it’s really, really rough at first. I do a lot of posing for all the different characters in the book, or I use family snapshots. I use all the visual research to refine the drawings. Once I have my really good pencil sketch, I then ink it, put into Photoshop, color. I shade it on a separate piece of paper, which I also scan into Photoshop, then stick those all together. I never know what it’s going to look like until this moment when I put all the layers together, and then add the text.
Are the looks of the characters different from the real-life people?
ALISON BECHDEL
Well, I tried really, really hard to make them true to life, true to my experience. It’s my experience of my mother. I’m sure she doesn’t really identify completely with the person I’ve created, but I didn’t try to disguise anyone, or change them. I was trying really hard to get the real people.
I wondered if maybe the characters took off on you.
ALISON BECHDEL
Oh. No. I didn’t let them. Often I say there’s not really any difference between fiction and nonfiction, it’s just whether you call people by the same names or not. But that is a really big difference. It would have been really interesting to let my mother take off on her own as a character. Maybe I’ll do that in my next book.
You said there were moments when you were questioning whether the self-referential aspect of writing the story got too intense. How did you balance out that? How did you think about it while you were doing it? The exercise of trying to capture your own consciousness while you are writing might become very complex. How did you figure that out?
ALISON BECHDEL
You’re asking how did I balance the intense self-referential element of the story, in a way that wasn’t completely overwhelming for the reader. I don’t know if I did. I was actually teaching a comics class last spring, and one of the books we read was my book, and I think some of these college kids found it a little too self-reflexive. Perhaps that’s because they’re young, and not that self-reflexive, they haven’t thought about their lives long enough.
KATIE ROIPHE
Didn’t you undercut that with a little bit of humor? The book is very funny at certain key points, and that’s what cuts against that feeling of, “I’m actually in someone’s head.” Laughter creates air on the page.
ALISON BECHDEL
I tried to do that.
KATIE ROIPHE
I would say you did do it, and it might be self-referential, but that aspect of it is what resonates with a lot of people. If you’re trying to grapple with your difficult mother, you’re going to have layers of whatever going on. The fact that you’re tracking all that and still observing it is very helpful for the rest of us.
ALISON BECHDEL
It was very confusing, though.
KATIE ROIPHE
Did you try to use the humor in that way? Since you look so bewildered, it seems that you didn’t.
ALISON BECHDEL
I try not to get too conscious about humor. I get nervous even talking about being funny, because I worry then that I’ll never be able to do it. I think that my book Fun Home was funnier. This one has a different feel. It’s not really very funny, and most of the funny lines are just things that I wrote down that my mother said.
How did you work out the structure of the story?
ALISON BECHDEL
Well, at one point I had this huge six-by-four-foot chart on my wall with hundreds of little Post-its, and index cards, and notes, and a grid. It was a very unwieldy story to write, mostly because there was no story. I had to find a story in all these different strands. At a certain point, I realized that there were actually through-lines. There was the story of my mother’s life, going to college in the fifties, and getting married in the sixties. There was my fixation with Donald Winnicott. There was a relationship I had in my twenties. These layers of things that were starting to become clear. It wasn’t really an outline, it was just this kind of evolving Excel spreadsheet. I had it on my computer as well as on the wall.
KATIE ROIPHE
It sounds like you’re very organized about your research and your creative process. It’s not like you just sit there and do it.
ALISON BECHDEL
It’s really organized and really belabored. I wish it just came out of me, but that didn’t happen.
What was the process of writing this book like compared with writing Fun Home?
ALISON BECHDEL
In the review by Heather Love that I mentioned at the beginning, she talks about some people who have criticized Are You My Mother? for being shapeless, for not having a conventional narrative. She says that Fun Home was like a classical temple, built over Minoan ruins, and that Fun Home is about an Oedipal struggle. That book was about a pretty straightforward battle with my dad, but the story with me and my mother is pre-Oedipal. That’s where the drama with the mother happens, in these early years, these really murky inaccessible years, the same period which Donald Winnicott shed so much light on. It is necessarily a less linear kind of story. So maybe out of necessity this book is more complicated.
Winnicott also said a really cool thing: “The father must be murdered, but the mother can be dismantled.” I keep wanting to say it the other way. I kind of want to say, “The father can be murdered, but the mother must be dismantled,” because it’s a lot easier to murder someone than to dismantle them, as I discovered.
How do you get through to the end of something when it’s so difficult, so emotionally painful? Even if you love writing and drawing, this particular writing and drawing project is excruciating.
ALISON BECHDEL
It helps to have a publisher breathing down your neck. I was way late on this book. It took me a couple years past the deadline I had promised, and that was nerve-racking. I was living through all these experiences of shame and rejection and humiliation. I was steeped in that stuff all day, for years, and it was compounded by the fact that I was going through menopause, which no one should talk about. No one is interested in that unless you are one of the people who are at this moment going through it, so I won’t talk about that anymore.
KATIE ROIPHE
Was there a moment where you had a revelation, where you were going to put the difficulty of the process into the book itself? Was there a moment where you thought, “I’m going to put my struggle about writing this book into the book itself,” or did you always intend to put it in?
ALISON BECHDEL
It was not part of the original conception at all. At the start I didn’t put it in. But I did have an idea at the very beginning that the book would be about writing Fun Home, about writing the memoir about my father, and my agent said I could not do that, she thought that nobody would have the patience for that. She felt it was just too self-indulgent. So, I avoided it. I didn’t do it for a couple years. Instead I worked on this other version of the book, but when I finally showed that to my agent, she thought it did not make sense. I then went back to my original idea, and made the book about writing the other book, and then all of my process and difficulties about writing this book became a part of it, too, and I just let it happen.
KATIE ROIPHE
And once you had that, did it make it easier to write it?
ALISON BECHDEL
No. At least I felt like I was going to finish it at that point, but it wasn’t great. The only moment of true pleasure and inspiration was one day when I envisioned Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott meeting in the park. That just came out of nowhere.
KATIE ROIPHE
Did you have a moment when you looked at this book and thought it was great and that you were happy it came out this way? Have you had some untormented moment of satisfaction with this book?
ALISON BECHDEL
I felt really good about it a couple of months when I was finishing the drawing, when my life was turned over to drawing, like twenty hours a day. But then it ended. When I saw the actual book it went away.
I wanted to ask you about the use of color in your books.
ALISON BECHDEL
When I was writing Fun Home, my original idea was to make it just black-and-white as a kind of defiant act to my father, who was very obsessed with color. I wanted to prove that you could tell a nuanced story in black-and-white. I became a cartoonist so I didn’t have to deal with color. Later on, talking to the art department, we realized there was a way to get a very cool effect by turning my gray ink-wash shade to green. I am glad I did that, I think it’s very cool.
With Are You My Mother?, I liked working with just two colors, with black and then another color, so I kept doing that, so I just had to pick a different color. Red was pretty much the only other color there was.
How do you deal with the frustration of, supposedly, writing nonfiction about your real family and the real conversations with your mother, and not having a recording of everything?
ALISON BECHDEL
I hate that. I wish I had a video camera on my shoulder all the time, but that would become impossible, because you don’t have time to watch it. I’m getting to feel a little more confident and free in reconstructing things like conversations I had when I was three. I try not to do that too much, but you kind of have to do that. I wish I had transcripts of the actual conversations, but it is a little frustrating that I don’t.
You are very personal in what you write, and very willing to expose yourself, like draw yourself having sex, and in the bathroom, and you just tell the truth. But there’s also this other element where I sense you’re a very deeply private person. I was led to think so after I saw a drawing you did of yourself having to give yourself a pep talk, before giving some chocolates for Christmas to the staff in the post office. You had to psych yourself up just to do that little thing. I want to ask about the coexistence of these two contradictory impulses of wanting to be seen and wanting to be invisible at the same time.
ALISON BECHDEL
How do I reconcile the fact that I show all these very personal moments from my life, with the fact that I’m basically almost autistic shy? Of course you wouldn’t know that because I do pretty good sitting in public. I’m functioning pretty well. I don’t know. Being my public self, I feel like I’ve created this almost character that I can hide behind. I think it’s accurate. I think it’s me. But it’s still like an avatar. But when I’m just trying to give the ladies at the bank a Christmas present, I’m just paralyzed with shyness and anxiety. But that’s because I’m not talking about myself.
KATIE ROIPHE
A lot of writers are shy, because the way that they can express themselves is in writing, and they can’t be comfortable in a room. So they compensate in these elaborate ways.
ALISON BECHDEL
Now we always have to go out in public and talk like this. Virginia Woolf didn’t have to. Imagine if she’d had to go on an author’s tour.