Biography - Part 4

 Interviews

In Alison Bechdel's memoirs, there is an extreme honesty in her recollections and realizations of her past, and when asked about these traumas in interviews she is very open.

In this interview, Alison goes in depth about her methods when creating her comics. She shows a step by step process with images and even goes as far as saying how she wouldn't be able to work without 'google image search' which is interesting. Even in a memoir research and reference is still really important.

 Here Alison discusses Fun Home and also reveals that she has no inhibitions about writing about her past, though her family wishes she weren't so in depth.

Also, Fun Home is currently being adapted in a theatre performance!

In The Guardian, Laura Miller describes Alison's newest work Are You My Mother?,

  "Like all of Bechdel's work, Are You My Mother? is furiously literary, full of citations and quotations, and crafty symbolic parallels to the books its author is so often depicted reading with furrowed brow. The presiding genii of this particular work include Adrienne Rich, Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller and, above all, Virginia Woolf and the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. ("I want him to be my mother," cartoon Alison says.) The concepts Winnicott contributed to object relations theory (the "good enough" mother, transitional objects, the true and false self, etc) provide themes for each of the book's seven chapters, but its swirling, circular structure derives from Woolf."

Source