Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Read this memoir last night and this morning on the plane flying back from NYC (though it's only a short flight, I managed to get through almost all of it).

It's lovely: moving, funny, and containing all kinds of fascinating literary allusions and references to Fitzgerald, Proust, Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few.

What emerges is a highly complex man (Bruce Bechdel, Alison's father) who is loving, stern, distant, manipulative, and conflicted. I have rarely felt that I understood a long-dead character from a book as I do now about him. His death at 44 seems doubly tragic in the consequences it has on a young girl, a traumatized family, and a man who never had the chance to live his life the way he needed to.

And as Bechdel herself noted at her performance Saturday at The New Yorker Festival, the book is as much a book about gender non-conformity as it is about twin tales a man who never has the chance to come out of the closet and a young girl's acceptance of her own lesbianism.

I highly recommend this book: even for those who don't think you enjoy graphic novels, there is a real insight here that the form allows Bechdel to delve into in a very unique way. Not only is her internal life presented here but "archival" evidence from her past, recreated here in graphic novel form: diaries, letters, police reports, telegrams, old photos. It's highly readable and immensely moving.

OK off to Thanksgiving dinner now. Happy holidays, everyone.

Alison Bechdel and Judith Thurman

As I noted a few posts ago, I am a big fan of comics (or graphic novels; I have such a hard time with which term to use). This afternoon I had the great opportunity to see two personalities I admire in conversation.

I came to Dykes to Watch Out For late in life: far after it had been syndicated across the country and just before its run ended in the late 2000s. I never read it regularly but I did end up finding an anthology a few years after its run that I quite enjoyed. It`s got a soap opera quality to it: like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk and R Crumb all rolled into one. It`s got a normalcy that easy to relate to yet for me it contains a distance that makes it compelling and exotic.

Are you my mother

Bechdel`s two post-Dykes memoirs are tales of her family: Fun Home about her father and the latest, Are You My Mother, about her relationship with her mother. Bechdel really pushes the limits of what graphic novels can and should do. As she noted in her discussion this afternoon, she is interested in how comics can represent the internal lives of characters (as they have so long been focused on action or external lives). And her works do what good movies do: tell stories in a way that you forget the form or the attractiveness of the medium and just let the story overtake you.

Thurman is an amazing writer though I wonder how well-suited she was to Alison Bechdel`s on stage personality. Bechdel leans toward being an introvert, it seems to me, and Thurman likes the cerebral idiom frequently: lots of questions that seemed to be to esoteric and far too psychological for the subject herself to address (questions of `the other`etc etc don`t seem to be very instructive when discussing comics with the artist. That`s not to suggest that Bechdel isn`t amazingly charming and bright but there is a highly pragmatic aspect to her approach as an interview subject).

Excellent questions from the audience: about color choices, about comics a form geared at a society becoming less (traditionally) literate, about the presence of Dykes in today`s queer culture.

Great show overall and I definitely have Bechdel`s two memoirs at the top of my reading list for the fall.

from Dykes to Watch Out For

New Yorker Festival: Friday

I`m an idiot. But sometimes being an idiot can have certain benefits.

I had a ticket to Marilynne Robinson and Nathan Englander`s show on FAITH as part of the New Yorker Festival. I got into the right lane for theatre two (I was a bit late though the show hadn`t started), rushed into the nearly packed theatre and found a seat. Five minutes later the show began. All men entered and walked up on stage, five men. I had gone into the wrong theatre but there was no way I was going to get up and cause a major spectacle in order to get out and into the right theatre. So I shrugged and leaned into my seat.

Aleksandar Hemon, Orhan Pamuk, Hisham Matar and Colum McCann. Hey, not bad.

Three of these writers have work I know very well. One less so though I`ve heard his name. So suddenly I felt it was synchronicity.

(Sidebar: I had tried to get tickets to this show initially while in Berlin but was told it was oversold and there were no tickets available. I sure hope I didn`t cause anyone to miss out!)

Great conversation: about the city as character, about the importance of cities in modern fiction (and journalism), about city life vs. pastoral life (particularly in a modern text since, as Willing Davidson, the moderator, suggested, there are few examples of modern pastoral novels from the last 30-40 years.

The biggest surprise was running into someone I wasn`t expecting to in the theatre later and getting confirmation that they are coming to our Festival in 2013! Someone I`ve been working on for a while who formally told me that they are in! Yes! Can`t say who it is and won`t be releasing any names until March, 2013, but it`s a good one, I promise...

Aleksandar Hemon: militantly urban

So much to be said on this topic of cities, particularly since I have been thinking a lot about The City lately in terms of Berlin. A man stood up, in fact, and referenced Joseph Roth, a writer I`ve been writing and thinking a lot about the last several weeks.

It`s a shame I missed Marilynne Robinson and Nathan Englander! Damn! I was looking forward to hearing them. But, hey, good show anyway.

And on that note, I`m out of this hotel room now: it`s Friday night in New York City, baby. Time to get wicked!

New Yorker Festival

So I am off to New York this weekend for a few meetings and to catch a few events at the New Yorker Festival. They do some very interesting shows and, naturally, being in New York, get some of the best writers in the world.

I am looking forward to Faith: a conversation with Nathan Englander, Marilynne Robinson and Chris Adrian. I'm a big fan of Nathan Englander and I love his book The Ministry of Special Cases. And Marilynne Robinson's work is always raved about though I've only read Gilead. Home has been on my list for a few years now but I've still not managed to read it. There was such an interesting conversation going around about her work when Home was published: about faith today, about being an older female writer with a best-seller today, about being a literary writer in today's climate. At any rate, the three of them in conversation about Faith today.

Also looking forward to seeing Alison Bechdel and Judith Therman. Bechdel was all over the literosphere in the summer for her new memoir, Are You My Mother. She lives just across the border in Vermont (or has a place there, at any rate) and has been on our radar for a few years now. As noted in my last post, I'm a big fan of the comic/graphic novel, but I fear Alison Bechdel is a tough writer to land at this point in her career.

For those wondering why we don't always have writers like Bechdel and Robinson and Englander (though we try), as usual, it's a matter of $$. Writers who are currently being buzzed about are highly in demand and can get upwards of 60 invitations a week! A friend of mine (a well-known writer) says that after a while, one starts to feel a bit depressed and overwhelmed at so much attention so raising prices of speaking fees is the only way to determine which invitation is priority. I guess I get that...then agents get involved...it isn't pretty!

Unfortunately, what it means for a Festival like ours is that inviting big name writers with buzz in the literosphere can be pricey! Every year we try to bring at least a few if we can...

There are a few more shows on my list for the next few days and a few I wanted to see but couldn't make work because of other things going on in New York this weekend. But glad to have the chance to hang out in one of most favorite cities in the world for a few days.