Alison Bechdel: “It’s me who looks like my character”

It was in 1983 that the American designer Alison Bechdel began, in the New York feminist magazine WomaNews, his series Dykes to Watch Out For (Lesbians to watch, in VF). But her career took another turn in 2006 when she published her first graphic novel, Fun Homewhere she looks back on her trauma, the suicide of her father.

Since then, the creator of the “Bechdel Test”, the tool for measuring the representation of women in cinema, has dug this autobiographical furrow with Are you my mom? (2012), and his brand new graphic novel, The Secret of Superhuman Strength. In this latest comic strip, selected for the Prix Médicis (foreign novels section) and also for the Les Inrockuptibles prize in the comics category, the sixty-year-old author, based in Vermont, discusses the importance of physical exercise during his life, inviting writers such as Jack Kerouac to his story.

“There are still terrible things that I have not revealed to the public yet!”

Your new comic borrows from the autobiography genre like the previous ones. Why ?

It goes back to my childhood. My parents were too busy to pay attention to me so I drew and kept a diary. It was a way for me to keep traces of myself, to have the feeling of existing. Art is for me the continuation of this need I had as a child to see my own reflection. It’s compulsive, a neurosis. Maybe that explains why I can’t make things up in my books, why I only write about what happened. But, lately I’ve evolved, I see possibilities of fiction in a way that I never considered. For my next book, I experiment with autofiction, I will tell memories that I invented. I feel a lot of freedom and excitement.

You talk about your addictions, your anxieties. Is it important to write the truth about yourself?

I try to be honest. But I’m sure I still protect myself. The fundamental narcissism that is in us prevents us from appearing at our worst. There are still terrible things that I have not revealed to the public yet!

When you draw yourself, do you see an avatar of yourself or a character?

It’s a good question. I find that with my hairstyle and my strange glasses I am easy to draw, I have become a cartoon. Sometimes I feel like I look like my character rather than the other way around.

“My mother died early in the writing process. I then felt very strongly the feeling that I would be the next to die”

When did you realize that physical activities were so important to you that you had to dedicate a book to them?

when after You are my mom ?, I had to move on to another project. It was one of the last subjects that fascinated me. I had written about my father’s suicide in Fun Homeon my conflict with my mother in Are you my mom?… There was nothing else left for me to say. Physical exercise has always been a refuge for me, a way to safeguard my mental health. At first it was strange to write about it. There was the possibility that by dissecting it in a cerebral way, I would destroy an activity that gave me so much pleasure. But that was not the case.

Initially, you thought this fitness comic project would be easy to complete. In the end, it kept you busy for eight years. Why ?

Yes, I wanted to break my habits and go fast. But circumstances worked against me. My mother died early in the writing process. I then had a very strong feeling that I would be the next to die. It can help you get organized and make you very efficient, but it can also confuse you and slow you down. I couldn’t concentrate like I should and drawing a funny comic seemed inappropriate. And then, as I organized The Secret of Superhuman Strength per decade, I had to go past my 50s to gain perspective.

If there was a message to be taken from Secretwhat would it be?

Our main problem is our narcissism, we cannot see beyond our own interests. And yet that is what we must realize if we are to survive on this planet that we are destroying with our greed and selfishness.

Why use the writer Jack Kerouac, the poet William Wordsworth or the journalist Margaret Fuller as characters in the Secret ?

I found it interesting to examine the roots of our culture of outdoor activities. These people enjoyed walking or hiking at a time when it was something new. Kerouac was on the front line, he didn’t have our modern equipment, he wore sneakers for climbing. I think transcendentalists like Fuller or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or romantics like Wordsworth, were on their own spiritual journey. In a way, they were my companions. If they intervene in my book, it is also because they make it more interesting. My life isn’t as thrilling as that!

This writing technique, you initiated it in Fun Home.

Yes, I had trouble writing it because I hadn’t seen my father for twenty years. I was trying to access my memories of him so, like a student doing her homework, I started reading his favorite books. I saw parallels between the lives of the authors and that of my father. It gave to Fun Home a form that worked well. Since then, turning to books has become my method.

“Psychotherapy allowed me to be a three-dimensional person”

In The secret…they are sometimes “personal development” books.

These kinds of books provoke in me an ambivalent feeling. When I was younger, I thought they would make me better, it didn’t. That these books are so successful moves me, it’s proof that everyone is lost. What we really need is to learn from within. What these books do not tell us – unlike psychotherapies.

Exactly, you stopped psychotherapy last year…

Psychotherapy saved me. First by helping me to understand what was happening in my family, my father’s suicide, the grief that I have long repressed. This work allowed me to be a three-dimensional person. It also helped me to write a book like Fun Home… It wasn’t easy, it was like washing the family’s dirty laundry in public. My mother thought I was a bad girl. Now, after thirty years of shrinking, I’m done.

Do you always take pictures of yourself to draw?

Yes. My personal photos are mixed with those for which I pose for a book. When I look at them, it’s hard to see which ones are genuine and which ones are made up. When I posed as my parents, it created a connection that wouldn’t have been so strong otherwise.

Fun Home has been adapted into a musical, and a feature film is in the works. Are you surprised by the fate of this book?

Yes, it’s crazy. This story, I wrote it twenty years ago. Everything that happens to Fun Home keeps me in my past, although I have evolved a lot since then.

In 1985, in a page of Lesbians to follow, you laid the foundations of what has since become the “Bechdel test”, a feminist reading grid for all films. Do you think things have improved in the cinema or that there is still so much to do?

I believe that there has been enormous progress since the 1980s. Many more films than before pass the test, even if the “strong woman” has become something like a standard character, almost a same. Because there’s a pressure to portray women, people try to get away with characters that are maybe strong but simplistic, and not as complex as their male counterparts. I watch all kinds of movies and a lot of them don’t pass the “Bechdel Test”. But it was never thought of as a prescription, rather as something that pushes you to think.

The Secret of Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (Denoël Graphic), translated from English (United States) by Lili Sztajn, 240p., €26.