Alison Bechdel is the author of two internationally acclaimed graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller, won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a Best Book of the 21st Century by the Guardian, was adapted to a broadway musical which won five Tony Awards and is currently being adapted for cinema. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered ''one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre''. Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney''s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur ''Genius'' Award.
From the author of Fun Home , a profound graphic memoir of Bechdel''s lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s (''Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!'') to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author''s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others. A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the SENSATIONAL LONDON MUSICAL The award-winning musical adaptation that took America by storm now playing to five star reviews at the Young Vic 'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew.
---- 'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent 'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the 2019 Olivier Award nominated musical. ''A sapphic graphic treat'' The Times A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel''s gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi''s Persepolis you''ll love this. Meet Alison''s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family''s Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew. ''A groundbreaking masterpiece'' The Independent ''A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy'' Evening Standard **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN ''S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon: 'an extraordinarily intimate account of family secrets that manages to be shocking, unsettling and life-affirming at the same time', as Sarah Walters wrote in the Guardian. The Times said it was 'incontestibly the graphic book of the year', while the Observer recently chose it as one of the ten best graphic novels ever published.
While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homsexual, this new memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.
It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to one explosively illuminating Dr Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) love life. And, finally, back to Mother - to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
