Life Drawing
June 3rd, 2006 | Uncategorized
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.
10 Responses to “Life Drawing”
yeah reading Fun Home inspired me to pick up my copy of Amphigorey after a couple years. I love seeing how your work spins on Gorey’s with its gothic dry wit. I also went back to a favorite object-lesson from “Indelible”, about a certain Prudence, containing a favorite stanza:
“Bereft, she ate nothing but stale marzipan/
And thrashed about tragically on the divan”.
Hyuk. Classic. Perhaps second only to:
“It would carry off objects of which it grew fond/
And protect them by dropping them into the pond”.
“A” is for ANNA,
Who fell down the stairs.
“B” is for Basil,
Assaulted by bears…
Any chance of sa stop on the tour in Atlanta? (i haven’t checked in here recently, and this is the first i’ve heard of either “Fun Home” or the tour…)
The comparison between yourself and Mr Earbrass, and the photo that accompanied such, was wonderful. As a sesquidecenniaI (is that a word?) reader, though, I do wish you free from “disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews … [and] the unspeakable horror of the literary life.” I look forward to your visit to Seattle and the Bailey Coy event, and will refrain from listing the numerous insances of Gorey-dom in my life, except for my wedding invitations being pictorial excerpts from “The Epileptic Bicycle” with different subtitles.
If you get the time to answer this, I would like to ask: what do you think of the work of Louis Wain?
May I also say, effing congratulations for all the well-deserved, it’s-about-effing-time recognitions from the mainsteam press.
OK — that’s my second favorite quote about graphic novelists. “People who write graphic novels are clinically insane.”
I’m sorry, but my first favorite quote is still something that Marjane Satrapi said on Friday while speaking here about “Persepolis”. She said “Graphic novelists are the bisexuals of the literary world. Neither just comics nor writing, but both — people get really upset when you’re not either one or the other.”
Salon.com has just published a very complementary review…
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/05/bechdel/
just read the article in People yesterday. congratulations! you’re finally getting the national respect that you deserve! i did think it was funny how they made ti out to look like biographical graphic novels were soem sort of novel idea … obviously a review copy of Maus never passed over their desks …
I just read the VERY favorable review of “Fun Home” at Salon.Com, so congrats on that.
I should be receiving my copy from “Medusa.Com” this week; no doubt, I’ll be putting off everything that I should be getting done to read it. (But do I really need an excuse to goof off? Nope! Procrastination is my middle name.)
I just have to say that although I bought Fun Home through Powell’s, I’ve been checking its ranking on Amazon.com like it’s stock that I own now. It’s like your company has just gone public.
I cheered when it nudged past #1000. Now it’s at something like #116. ::biting fingernails::
I’m feeling like someone who’s liked a band for years, and suddenly every hip teenage girl on the block is into that same band. No, MY Allison.