Alison Bechdel Quotes

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person.
So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother.

There is a lack, a gap, a void.

"How's that?"

But in it's place, she has given me something else.

Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable.

"I think I can get up now."

She has given me the way out.

My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me...
...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.

Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.

I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.

I'm glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.

For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as "the library" might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.

Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers.

...did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned.

'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this they lacked. [as quoted by Alice Miller]'

She also says that the mother who requires accommodation from her child is just trying to get what her own mother refused her.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Whatever we say, we're always talking about ourselves.

Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper ... It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?
In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

She has given me a way out.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.

In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever.

But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling.

I am the one whose drive is being thwarted.

And I am the one who is thwarting it.