Alison Bechdel!

I met Alison Bechdel and I gave her a drawing I made of her and she said encouraging things to me and signed my copy of Fun Home and my copy of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and I am so happy. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never actually met a famous person who I really admire—unless meeting Megara and Cruella DeVille at Disney World counts. I freaked out a little bit.

She gave a lecture at Tulane today, and I wrote down some of the useful/inspirational/interesting things she said. Here are a few of them: 

• When she first started doing Dykes to Watch Out For she didn't have recurring characters because she wasn't confident that she could draw the same people again and again and make them look recognizably the same. 
• "The personal is the political. The political is the personal."
• Maps are where symbols and reality, signifiers and the signified, meet. Cartoons are maps.
• TRUTH!
• "...if we were completely equal and we got what we've been fighting for, we would make ourselves obsolete—we wouldn't need gay bars or women's book stores anymore."
• "Can trauma ever be good?"
• Are You My Mother? was originally going to be a book about relationships, the self and the other, but once she started working on it she realized that she needed to write about her mother.
• When asked about how to get over writer's block: "Just sit the hell down. Get a piece of rope and tie yourself to your chair."
• "What makes us want to create is a lack or damage or pain within us."
• On why she was okay putting her parents in the spotlight in her memoirs but felt the need to minimize her brothers' roles: "It felt okay to write about my parents because my parents were the ones who fucked me up."
• Sydney is her favorite character in Dykes to Watch Out For because she feels that she sort of became Sydney. However, all of the characters are reflections of her.
• "I only ever have one cat."