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Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel at a London g for Fun Home, 2006 September 10, 1960 (age 51) Born Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, United States Occupation cartoonist, author Nationality American Genres autobiography, social commentary Literary underground movement Dykes To Watch Out For, Fun Notable work(s) Home Influences[show] Influenced[show] www.dykestowatchoutfor.com Alison Bechdel ( /bɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl; born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.

Contents [hide] • •

1 Early life 2 Career o 2.1 Fun Home o 2.2 Are You My Mother?

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o 2.3 Later work 3 Personal life 4 Bibliography o 4.1 Collections o 4.2 Graphic memoir o 4.3 Stories 5 See also 6 Footnotes

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7 External links

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[edit] Early life Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania to Roman Catholic parents who were teachers. Bechdel's brother is keyboard player John Bechdel, who has worked with many bands including Ministry. Her family also owned and operated a funeral home. She attended Simon's Rock College and then Oberlin College, graduating in 1981.

[edit] Career Bechdel moved to New York City and applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry. She began Dykes to Watch Out For as a single drawing labeled "Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27".[4] An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews, a newspaper, which began to publish the strip regularly beginning with the July—August 1983 issue. After a year, other outlets began running the strip. In the first years, Dykes to Watch Out For consisted of unconnected strips without a regular cast or serialized storyline. Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, in 1987 while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. She became a full-time cartoonist in 1990 and later moved near Burlington, Vermont. She currently resides in Bolton, Vermont. Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the Bechdel test. In addition to Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. In 1988, she began a short-lived page-length strip about the staff of a queer newspaper, titled "Servants to the Cause", for The Advocate.

[edit] Fun Home Main article: Fun Home In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home, an autobiographical "tragicomic" chronicling her childhood and the years before and after her father's death. Fun Home has received

more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews in Entertainment Weekly, People and several features in The New York Times. Fun Home spent two weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list.[5][6] Fun Home was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by numerous sources, including The New York Times,[7] amazon.com,[8][9] The Times of London,[10] Publishers Weekly,[11] salon.com,[12] New York magazine,[13] and Entertainment Weekly.[13] Time magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year." Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. ... Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."[14] Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in the memoir/autobiography category.[15][16] It also won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.[17] Fun Home was also nominated for the Best Graphic Album award, and Bechdel was nominated for Best Writer/Artist.[18]

[edit] Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel's next graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, will be released in May 2012.[19] It will focus on her relationship with her mother.

[edit] Later work Dykes to Watch Out For was suspended in 2008 so that Bechdel can work on another graphic memoir, with the working title Love Life: A Case Study.[20] It will focus on Bechdel's relationships. Bechdel describes its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing".[21]

[edit] Personal life In February 2004, Bechdel married her partner since 1992, Amy Rubin, in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. However, all same-sex marriage licenses given by the city at that time were subsequently voided by the California Supreme Court. Bechdel and Rubin separated in 2006.[22] In November 2006 Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage of the American Heritage Dictionary.[citation needed]

[edit] Bibliography [edit] Collections •

Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1986, ISBN 0-932379-17-6)

More Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1988, ISBN 0-932379-45-1) New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1990, ISBN 0932379-79-6) • Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel (Firebrand Books, 1992, ISBN 1-56341008-7) • Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1993, ISBN 1-56341-0397) • Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1995, ISBN 1-56341067-2) • Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1997, ISBN 156341-086-9) • Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1998, ISBN 1-56341102-4) • The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1998) • Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 2000, ISBN 1-56341-122-9) • Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Alyson Publications, 2003, ISBN 1-55583-828-6) • Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For (Alyson Publications, 2005, ISBN 155583-833-2) • The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008, ISBN 0-61896880-6), a compendium containing the vast majority of the strips in all previous collections as well as all 2005-2008 strips not previously published • •

[edit] Graphic memoir •

2)

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, ISBN 0-618-47794-