Anodyne
Thursday, June 15, 2006
 

Recent reading:

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

"Bechdel literally acts out each scene that she draws, complete with props and costumes, posing as each person in a frame and capturing it all in photographs. In a video clip available on her website she describes this routine from the studio of her Bolton, Vt., home of ten years as her cat ambles in one corner of the frame. 'It indicates a weakness in my drawing technique,' she now says. “I can't make stuff up in writing or in drawing; I can only reproduce it.' While Bechdel uses this method with Dykes to Watch Out For, it has a different impact when the subjects are her own family members, including herself. 'With my family it has this weird other role, like I'm reliving my past, moment by moment.'

For Fun Home Bechdel found herself reenacting difficult scenes in her life and 'marinating in it.' A few years ago she actually visited the stretch of highway where her father was hit by a truck and took photographs of trucks rushing at her down the road. She describes the creative fodder she relied on for Fun Home as the 'detritus' of her childhood: drawings that go back to her seventh year, journals she began at age 10, an income/expense log she has kept since she was 13. She also dredged up maps of her hometown, grocery lists, sugar packets, and more ordinary mementos, such as photos, letters and ticket stubs. Her mother gave her a box of her father's letters, 'several hundred pages of his thinking.' Bechdel transcribed them all and incorporates fragments in her book."
- posted by cjb @ 9:16 AM


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