Her parents’ artistic frustrations loomed large over Bechdel’s childhood in another realization that accompanies the airport panel in Fun Home, she writes, “Perhaps this was when I cemented the unspoken compact with that I would never get married, that I would carry on to live the artist’s life they had each abdicated.”īechdel’s most recent book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, tells the story of the “artist’s life” she has lived in the decades since. In her first two graphic memoirs- Fun Home and Are You My Mother?-she remembers how it felt to carry that weight: the strange family business (both parents were temperamentally bohemian yet got stuck running the family funeral home in rural Pennsylvania in addition to working as schoolteachers), her mother’s emotional distance, her closeted gay father’s suicide. “This is too heavy!” she cries.īechdel is one of the foremost contemporary bards of family baggage. Bechdel speculates, however, that her parents had a very different experience: “While our travels widened my scope, I suspect my parents felt their own dwindling.” The page-wide drawing that accompanies those words depicts Bechdel’s father, paused mid-trudge in a busy airport, twisting around and urging her to “hurry up!” The child stumbles behind, lugging a large hard-sided suitcase with two hands. There, she experienced a “freedom from convention” that, she recalls, “was intoxicating.” Writing about the trip in her first book-length work, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, she explains how Europe’s looser mores provided a brief respite from the oppressive gender norms of American childhood. When she was six years old, the cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel accompanied her parents and brother on a two-week trip to Europe. A panel from Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength
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