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Author to author interview with Jessica Abel

June 27th, 2006

I recently did this interview on the literary site Beatrice.com with Jessica Abel. We talked about my memoir Fun Home and her recent graphic novel La Perdida.

A person could get used to this

June 26th, 2006

Fun Home got another great review in today’s NY Times, by George Gene Gustines. It’s also a great review for graphic narrative in general.

Throughout the memoir…the magic of the graphic format emerges. Ms. Bechdel’s qualms, trepidation and excitement emerge from the words and images working together. Somehow adding the two ingredients together conveys more than either one could do alone.

Planes, trains, automobiles and dissonance, or, The Complicity Polka

June 25th, 2006

I’ve gotten kind of addicted to blogging all my daily activities. I’ll stop now that I’m home and have no life again, but first I wanted to say a few things about what it was like ending my book tour yesterday.

I began this trip on airplanes, flying to the west coast and back. Then I switched to trains on the east coast. Then yesterday in Boston I rented a car for the last leg. It turned out to be a big honkin’ SUV. And it was really fun to drive. At last I understand.

My objective was Northampton, MA, where I had to give a reading at 4pm. But I decided to take a slight detour to the new Ikea in a suburb south of Boston. I needed to get some plates and silverware, and I knew that was sort of crazy since I’d never been there before and I only had a half-hour to spare and Ikea is an all-day venture at best. But I was all hopped up and feeling omnipotent in my giant vehicle, so I went for it. On the way I listened to a horrific radio program about what’s going on in the Congo. Normally I just can’t compute the news from Africa, it’s so brutal and baffling. But this reporter, Johann Hari, put things into lucid context.

It’s not some kind of inexplicable tribal violence. It’s simply global corporations at work, doing what corporations do–mining resources as cheaply as they can. Hari talked in particular about the diamond trade, and the terrible violence that stems from it so that westerners can have engagement rings. “At least I don’t have any diamonds,” I thought idly to myself as I barrelled along in my SUV. I’ve never understood why people invest diamonds with so much power. They’re gaudy, ugly things.

The trick of capitalism is the way it obliterates the trail of cause and effect. The news from Africa is baffling precisely because it refuses to connect the dots. And who wants to connect them anyway, when going to Ikea is so much more pleasant? And then there I was, with thousands of other SUVs, pouring into the sprawling parking lot.

As an aside, I must say that I made perhaps the quickest and most efficient visit to an Ikea ever in the history of the world, somehow navigating the vast, unfamiliar terrain, not getting distracted by all the alluring objects but homing right in on my plates and a box of silverware, using the auto-check out system and getting back to my rig in half an hour flat.

Still, it was disconcerting to find myself so caught up in this manic consumption fest. Back on the road, I was playing with the radio in the truck. There were controls for it on the steering wheel, in case it was too much of a strain to reach out and operate it from the dashboard. All of a sudden I came upon a song which was the perfect soundtrack for the moment. I grabbed my camera and attempted to capture the insane dissonance of it all in a brief movie. I still haven’t figured out how to embed videos here, so if you want to see it you have to click here and watch it on YouTube.

Later that afternoon, after my reading in Northampton, I had dinner with my aunt and uncle. I mentioned in my last post that my Aunt Mary gave me a pair of cufflinks. It was a very thoughtful gift, an implicit reference to a scene in my book where I talk about my cross-dressing tendencies, in particular my fixation with cufflinks.

But I didn’t mention that each cufflink sports a tiny diamond.

Broadside Books, Northampton MA

June 25th, 2006

Yesterday I finished the first leg of my Fun Home tour with this charming crowd in Northampton. As happened in Philadelphia, I spotted more relatives in the audience just before the reading began. This time it was my mom’s sister Mary and my Uncle Ed. They were very sweet to me. Ed gave me a copy of Son of Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland’s memoir of his father. And Mary gave me a handsome pair of cufflinks. Apparently I should write intimate, tell-all memoirs about my family more often.

Center for New Words, Boston

June 24th, 2006

Tonight the Center for New Words hosted a Fun Home reading at Simmons College in Boston. It was hot and steamy, and there was some kind of electrical situation in the original location. But the CNW and Simmons women quickly found another place. A sweaty but lovely dykestowatchoutforesque audience showed up, and I had a great time.

I love this photo. It’s so colorful. It’s like an Old Navy ad targeted at progressive intellectuals.

Toast Failure

June 24th, 2006

I am SO, SO sorry to anyone who showed up at the Toast Lounge in Somerville tonight expecting to see me there. I was supposed to come by and hang out after the reading I did at Simmons College for the Center for New Words, from 9 to 10. But my driver and I couldn’t find the place! And didn’t have a map! Or a phone number. I even got out on the street in Union Square and walked around asking people where Toast was, to no avail. Anyhow. I just got back to the hotel after being in the car for over an hour. And I’m terribly sorry and frustrated about the whole fiasco.

Blackout in Boston?

June 23rd, 2006

Okay, I know nobody’s really gonna see this, but I’ll post it anyway. I just found out that the place in Boston where I’m speaking tonight has been changed because there was a power outage. (There’s a big storm going on.) It’s now at Alumni Hall, which is also part of Simmons College. The address is 321 Brookline.

Whatever.

Oddities of the day

June 23rd, 2006

Today I traveled on the Acela from Philadelphia to Boston. As I was hanging out in the vast central waiting room of 30th St. Station before the train left, I saw this tiny mouse running across the marble floor.

Then when I got to my hotel room in Boston, I realized it was the same hotel from which a woman flashed the Dyke March last year. For real. We were marching along up Boylston, and in the window of a hotel across from the Public Garden two women in bathrobes were watching us go by. They were smiling and waving, and then one of them totally yanked open her bathrobe. For just a second, before collapsing out of view. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, here I am re-enacting the scene. But don’t worry, I’m fully clothed under there.

Now I’m getting ready to go do an event for the Center for New Words. It’ll be at Simmons College, the Linda K. Paretsky Conference Center, 300 The Fenway. Just in case anyone in Boston is reading this between now (5:06pm) and 7, when it starts. Or come to Toast Lounge at 708 Union Square in Somerville, where I’ll be later, after 9 tonight.

Philadelphia Story, or, Worlds Collide

June 23rd, 2006

Thursday I took the train from the nondescript underground remnants of Penn Station, where they were holding some kind of surreal “security expo” with bomb-sniffing dogs, to the glorious 30th St. Station in Philadelphia. See illustration.

I then proceeded to a handsome suburb called Mount Airy, which appeared to be populated solely by lesbian couples with children. At any rate, I never saw so many in one place before in my life. I signed books at The Big Blue Marble, a new independent bookstore in the neighborhood. Here’s Sheila, the owner.

And here’s Nava, a charming queerspawn poet who works there.

After hanging out and signing books there for a while, it was on to the august Giovanni’s Room, back in the city. I was expecting this to be another “meet and greet,” where I sit and sign peoples’ books and talk one-on-one to them. But there was a bit of a mix-up, and I walked into a room where thirty or forty people sat expectantly in rows facing one lone chair, as if for a reading. And of course you can’t just do a reading from a graphic novel. And I hadn’t prepared anything to say to a group. It was a rather nightmarish moment for an introvert, but somehow I rallied and we managed to have an interesting, intimate Q & A session.

THEN I scarfed down some food in the car while being driven to another august institution, the Philadelphia Free Library.

I was part of their reading series. They had a really nice auditorium that even had a dressing room backstage, lined with portraits of authors. Here I am in it, pretty well fried by now.

Fortunately the lovely librarian who was going to introduce me gave me some kind of zen slap to the back of the neck that she promised would give me twenty minutes of energy. I think it worked. As I looked back to scan the crowd before going onstage, I saw my Aunt Jane come in–that’s her in the green sweater in the rear right. She’s my dad’s sister.

I’ve never done a reading from the book with any family members present, and it was pretty intense. It felt much more emotional. Of course I’m worried some of my family will be hurt or angry about the book. But afterward, Aunt Jane gave me a big hug and said she was proud of me. It was really wonderful. Here we are together. I was named after Aunt Jane–Jane is my middle name. Also, she bought me a baseball bat and my first pair of boys’ sneakers when I was little. She’s utterly awesome.

And then there was still this big long line of people waiting patiently for me to sign their books while I was yacking to Aunt Jane and my dad’s cousin and her husband and daughter.

Anyhow. It was quite a day. I’m ready for the sensory deprivation tank.

The Sahara, the rain forest, Siberia, and Greenland

June 22nd, 2006

What do these places have in common? Click on the little map feature in the sidebar and discover for yourself.

Wow.

Oh, someone asked in a previous post what time zone the comments are set to, and it looks to me like GMT.