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Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) is an American cartoonist and bestselling author of three graphic memoirs that explore her lesbian identity, her complex relationships to her past, and her ever-evolving relationship to her body and gender. She is also the creator behind Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF), one of the most successful and longest-running queer American comic strips, which ran from 1983–2008 and was widely syndicated in gay and lesbian newspapers, featured online, and collected in books. DTWOF explores the intertwined lives of a group of lesbians and their larger community, with characters often discussing their sex and love lives alongside heated topical discussions about politics. It was in DTWOF in 1985 that Bechdel introduced the Bechdel test, which establishes the criteria for assessing gender bias in film, TV, and other works. To pass the Bechdel test, which is still widely used today, the work in question must feature two women who talk to each other about something other than men. 

Bechdel grew up in the small town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, with her mother Helen and father Bruce (both of whom were English teachers) and her two younger brothers John and Christian. The Bechdel family business was a funeral home, and when Bruce wasn’t teaching teenagers about literature, he was serving as the town’s mortician. Helen was a dedicated actress and Bruce was an obsessive gardener and interior decorator of their home, and Bechdel often felt secondary to her parents’ solitary creative pursuits. Bechdel left high school early to get her AA through Bard College and later earned her bachelor’s degree in studio art and art history from Oberlin College. 

After the success of DTWOF, Bechdel released her first memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about her closeted father, his suicide when she was 19, and her struggle to understand her sexuality. Fun Home was met with wide acclaim, garnering Bechdel a 2007 Eisner Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was adapted into a Tony award-winning Broadway musical, and has been optioned for a studio film. In 2012, Bechdel published her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which centers on her relationship with her mother. The memoir interweaves Bechdel’s phone conversations with Helen, her close readings of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and feminist literary icon Virginia Woolf, and Bechdel’s childhood memories. As in Fun Home, Bechdel explores coldness and absence at the center of a parental relationship, turning to literary and philosophical texts as a way to uncover emotional and psychological truths. After publishing Are You My Mother?, Bechdel was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her 2021 memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, explores how her lifelong fascination with exercise dovetails with a search for spiritual meaning, and was on the “Best of 2021” lists in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Next section Style & Presentation: Images & the Unspeakable in Fun Home

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