Alison Bechdel American Quotations

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

Yeah, I think some of that is just wish-fulfillment, you know, how little kids fantasize through their drawings. I wanted to be powerful.

I mean, I'll have an idea about what a panel will look like as I'm writing, but I often don't touch a pencil until the text is completely finished.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

And the idea that a story is true, that it actually happened, is endlessly compelling, I think, not just to me but to people in general.