Alison Bechdel and the Search for the Beginner’s Mind

One weekend in 1986, on a jaunt in a rented cabin with her soon-to-be-ex-lover, Alison Bechdel, a virtually unknown cartoonist in her twenties living in the Twin Cities, had an anxiety attack. The next installment of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a comic strip about lesbian life that Bechdel had been publishing for three years in alternative newspapers, was due, and her mind was as blank as the white page spread before her.

“Dykes” had begun as an act of spontaneous creation. Bechdel, writing a letter to a friend, had found herself doodling in the margins. Pleased with the result—a picture of a naked woman brandishing a coffee pot—she’d appended a caption: “Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27.” (The other twenty-six dykes had yet to be invented.) The idea of a catalogue of lesbians seized her fancy. She kept drawing and got her first single-panel cartoon published in the feminist monthly WomaNews, in the summer of 1983.

The series flowed easily. Each installment was a chance for a new joke, a new observation—about fashion, dating, public restrooms, artistic pretensions, being mistaken for a man—in an era when popular depictions of lesbian experience were rare. (The now-famous Bechdel test, which asks whether a movie features at least two women who speak to each other about something other than a man, appears in a strip from 1985.) But that weekend in the cabin, she recalls in her compilation book “The Indelible Alison Bechdel,” she felt stymied for the first time.

Bechdel soon overcame her block and started drawing “Dykes” again, this time with more purpose. She developed a steady cast of characters and continuous story lines. She added more political commentary, having the women weigh in on nuclear proliferation, environmental despoilment, and the slim prospects for queer liberation in a country dominated by Republicans. Her career crossed a certain threshold of seriousness. But she lost the untutored innocence that permits caffeine-addicted lesbians to emerge unbidden from half-conscious pen strokes. “I’ve never been able to regain that ‘beginner’s mind,’ ” Bechdel wrote, “that state of blissful ignorance before I realized exactly how hard it was to do what I was doing.”

The work would only get harder. As recognition of Bechdel’s talents grew, her methods became more laborious, her subject matter more agonizing. In a 1995 “fantasia” offering readers a “factory tour” showing how “Dykes” gets made, the cartoonist represents herself dressed in rags and chained to the drawing board, subsisting on water and rat-gnawed bread. For her celebrated graphic memoir “Fun Home,” from 2006, which examined her relationship with her father, a closeted gay man who killed himself at age forty-four, she used an exacting procedure of posing (as her father, her mother, and virtually every other character in the book) before a tripod-mounted camera, embodying each gesture she wished to capture in her panels. To create her follow-up parental memoir, “Are You My Mother?” (2012), she took some four thousand reference photographs. Pose, draw, pose, draw. “It’s my personal craziness,” she told the Guardian, in 2017. “I don’t feel I deserve to exist unless I’m working.”

“Fun Home” (subtitled “A Family Tragicomic”) is an astonishingly intimate investigation of the strange kinship between a secretly gay father and his openly gay daughter. It is also an assertion of high-modernist principles. With unerring precision Bechdel invokes Joyce, Proust, Colette, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and other authors her father loved, to shed light on his troubled interior. In doing so, she places herself as the heir not just of doomed Bruce Bechdel but of a whole artistic tradition.

“Are You My Mother?” is, if possible, both more intimate and more cerebral. Bechdel shares dreams, therapy sessions, and photographs of herself as a baby interspersed with blocks of text by psychoanalytic theorists such as Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, with relevant passages highlighted. (From Winnicott: “What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant’s understanding.”) Bechdel’s self-examination is so bare that it provokes in the reader a painful mixture of sorrow and embarrassment. In one scene, Bechdel informs her mother on the phone that she’s signed a contract for a book of cartoons. “You mean your lesbian cartoons?” her mother asks. Across several evenly sized panels, Bechdel keeps the visual focus on her own face as it hardens into a grimace that suggests she is holding back tears. Her mother continues, “I’m not comfortable with it. You know I’m not.”

After “Are You My Mother?,” Bechdel resolved to write something less tortured and more upbeat. She would do “a light, fun memoir about my athletic life that I could bang out quickly,” as she recalled in the resulting book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength.” By the time “Superhuman Strength” appeared, in 2021, it had become a passionate meditation on mortality, nature, and transcendence, with excurses on Emerson, Wordsworth, and Margaret Fuller. One critic wondered, in this magazine, if Bechdel was “constitutionally incapable of writing a ‘light, fun memoir,’ ” noting a perceptible anxiousness that led the cartoonist to keep inking in details “until the entirety of the human condition is accounted for.”

With her new graphic novel, “Spent” (Mariner), Bechdel appears once again to be trying for the light, fun book she’s longed to write. This time, she’s come closer than ever to pulling it off. “Spent” evokes the nimble, screwball silliness of Bechdel’s early career by staging a “Dykes” reunion. The novel’s protagonist is a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who lives in Vermont with her exuberant partner, Holly. Alison’s best friends are characters from “Dykes”: Ginger, Lois, Sparrow, and Stuart, now on the other side of middle age, and still living together in the same group household where the strip’s fans left them in the two-thousands.

“Spent” is narrated in the third person, the reader’s first sign that the novel, unlike Bechdel’s memoirs, creates a world of self-parody, not self-disclosure. “Alison Bechdel wakes from a troubled dream,” Bechdel writes near the beginning; and despite the echo of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” the novel seems to present a world in which trouble is left behind in dreams. “Alison Bechdel” worries about her consumerism, her loss of youthful idealism, and the cost of wild-foraged chanterelle mushrooms at the local co-op. She and her partner Holly run a pygmy-goat sanctuary, and there are lots of bleating mouths to feed. She frets about her strained relationship with her sister Sheila, who’s become an ardent Trump supporter. (When Sheila calls, we see the sharped chords from the “Psycho” shower scene hanging in the air: “Sheila’s special ringtone.”) Above all, she broods about her work. With success has come alienation.

Alison’s breakthrough—the work that’s paid for the house, the barn, and the goat feed—was a graphic memoir about her father called “Death & Taxidermy” that has been adapted into a ludicrously over-the-top TV show featuring dragons, cannibalism, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (Extracts from the memoir reproduce the sombre tone and blue wash of “Fun Home,” but here the drama focusses not on sexual secrecy but on vegetarianism.) Now she needs to write a follow-up. She’s signed a book contract with a conglomerate called Megalopub. (“Aren’t they owned by that conservative media mogul who’s destroyed American democracy?” Alison asks her agent.) Her absurdly young editor, Chloe Snailbed (an anagram of “Alison Bechdel”), is a hot-shot marketer who helped a book called “Fuck These Fucking Fucks” sell a million copies. “I’d like to see you on at least five platforms, including TikTok, posting a couple times a week,” Chloe advises. “There’s no way,” Alison pleads, “a memoir by a lesbian goat-welfare activist is going to sell a million copies.”.