Alison Bechdel

THE FATE OF AN AUTHOR WHO GREW UP IN A funeral home may be that every book she writes becomes a contemplation of mortality. That certainly seems to be the case for Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist who shot to literary fame with the 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, named after the family funeral home where she spent her formative years. That book dealt with Bechdel’s coming out during college, the subsequent revelation that her father had had sexual relationships with men, and his untimely death, which Bechdel believes to have been a suicide. Her next book, Are You My Mother?, sought to unpack Bechdel’s complicated relationship with her mom.

“After spending a long time writing these intense family memoirs that were kind of grueling, I thought it would be fun to as a humorous account of her lifelong obsession with exercise, but the resultant book is hardly a breezy read: the cartoon version of Bechdel turns to physical activity in an attempt to outrun death in her younger years. Then, after she’s accepted the inevitable, she exercises in an effort to achieve enlightenment.