Last night a whole buncha wonderful people came to my reading at the community center in SF. The building is this huge handsome place, all very well-appointed. They had excellent equipment too–look how big they could project the pictures from my book.
I’m sorry this is such a brief post. Maybe I’ll elaborate later, but right now I have to race off to my reading in Berkeley at Cody’s.
A sizeable crowd came to my reading at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books tonight. They had some particularly good questions. Martha, my literary escort, counted 83 people in the audience. It’s so wild being on a book tour with a big publisher. I’ve published books for years with small presses, and either they didn’t send me on a tour at all, or they sent me on a tour that I had to partially fund myself. And of course I’d be on my own, renting cars, finding bookstores, staying in peoples’ houses.
But with Houghton Mifflin, they have a literary escort in each city who ferries me around to things. Plus they’re putting me in really nice hotels. Here I am having my room service dinner after my reading tonight.
Earlier today I went by the Cartoon Art Museum to see the No Straight Lines exhibit. It was very cool seeing peoples’ actual original artwork. Here I am looking at a piece by Jen Camper. 
Here I am last night at A Different Light, helping the bookstore guy to rig up an impromptu screen for my “reading.” Man. I thought I was done with the techno-geek stuff when I finished all the complicated computer work on Fun Home. But apparently not. Now in order to read, I have to lug around all this equipment–my laptop, a projector, cables–and I have to make sure bookstores are set up for me to do this powerpoint presentation.
It’s worth it, though. It’s really cool to project the story and narrate it to an audience. A very nice crowd came last night to A Different Light, even though the Dyke March was amassing at the same time. Soon after I finished, there was this tremendous roar of motorcycles from Santa Monica Boulevard. It was the Dykes on Bikes starting off the march. But I couldn’t even run to the door and watch because I had to finish signing books then rush off to the airport to catch a 10:20 flight to San Francisco. Which ended up not taking off until nearly midnight.
God, air travel is torture. Here I am as we sat on the tarmac waiting to go. At least I had all three seats to myself.
Yesterday I went to Phranc’s studio for a couple hours. We worked on stuff for a show we’re doing together this fall at Pine Street Art Works, the gallery in Burlington where I had my book launch last week. Phranc’s been making astonishing things out of cardboard for years–it started with shoes, I think, then she moved on to all kinds of clothes and other objects. Pop tarts! Lifejackets! Cardboard chocolates! Check out her blog.
Her latest venture is Phranc of California, a line of clothing fabricated entirely from paper and sewn on her grandmother’s sewing machine. Here she is creating a hand-painted length of striped fabric from which she’s going to make a shirt. That’s me in the background making a life-size paper doll of Phranc. It’s a mock-up to see if we can figure out a way to get the paper clothes onto flat cardboard cutouts of these big drawings of people. The people will be part of my contribution to our art show.
Here’s a close-up of Phranc making stripes. She’s gonna painstakingly stripe up that whole huge sheet of paper. It’s an amazing feat.
I spoke to a small but delightful audience at Book Soup last night. (Maybe everyone was at the Bottoms Up! anal sex workshop that Babeland was having at the same time.)
It was a really nice bookstore. I wish I’d had time to hang out and browse. My buddy Phranc and her girlfriend Lisa showed up, and afterward took me out for the best matzoh ball soup I ever had in my life. At Canter’s Delicatessen. Here’s a pic of Phranc and me.
I had a really nice reading and signing for Fun Home last night at my local Bunns & Noodle, in Burlington VT. (Photo courtesy of my friend Samuel Lurie.) But it was weird reading this very intimate material to an audience filled with people I know. Somehow it’s easier reading to complete strangers.
I got up at 5 this morning to fly to Los Angeles. I’m posting this from O’Hare. You can often find yourself a nice little nook with an outlet under one of these three-pole supports that line the concourses. 
I was feeling pretty cool until I almost trashed my charger by yanking it out of the wall as I was posing for the photo.
Man. My little burst of fame reached a new level this morning. The FedEx guy brought a package and instead of just handing it to me, gave me a knowing smile and said “nice piece in Entertainment Weekly.”
That was pretty cool. But I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. I’m happy for all the attention, but it’s rather jarring after my long years of relative obscurity.
I won’t keep making posts about every Fun Home review that comes out, but there’s a really great one on Salon today, by Douglas Wolk.
“Fun Home” is a beautiful, assured piece of work, by far the best thing Bechdel has done in over two decades as a cartoonist. Her language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time.
Okay. I gotta get back to work.
Hi DTWOF Fans!
I’m interrupting your regularly-scheduled DTWOF and Fun Home programming to introduce myself! As Alison’s new assistant, I will be attempting to fill Cathy Resmer’s capable and organized shoes to help with website updates, email, and other communications with the outside world.
Katie Sullivan
I had a party last night to officially launch Fun Home. Liza Cowan hosted it at her great new gallery in Burlington, VT, Pine Street Art Works. There was a funeral theme to the evening: funereal attire optional, organ music, smelling salts. Lookit this amazing wreath Liza ordered–the flowers match the colors of the book cover. If you care to see a little slideshow of unfortunately blurred pictures, click here and you’ll go to Flickr. Or here are some shots Liza posted on the gallery’s site.
More Fun Home news. Margot Harrison wrote a really excellent profile about me and my memoir for my local alt weekly Seven Days this week. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article about myself that didn’t make me cringe at least once until now. It’s exceptionally accurate.
There’s also an article about Fun Home in People magazine, the one just on the newsstands, though I haven’t seen it yet. I spent three hours posing in a cold cemetery for the photo last week. Holding a shovel.
The shovel was my idea, because writing Fun Home felt at times like I was digging my father up. In fact, for a while I wanted to use one of my favorite silly Edward Gorey poems as an epigraph for the book. Why am I writing about Edward Gorey all the time lately? Sorry. But let me just quote the poem, which is from one of his abecedarian volumes, The Fatal Lozenge. (N.B.: A ‘resurrectionist’ is a grave-robber, or someone who digs up bodies in order to sell them for dissection.)
The resurrectionist goes plying
without ado his simple trade;
Material is always dying.
And got with nothing but a spade.