Alison Bechdel
Cartoonist, New York Times bestseller, and Tony Award winning graphic novelist
Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic novelist who writes and draws stories that explore universal concerns—from the building of community, to the complexity of family relationships—through the minute observation and recording of her own life. Bechdel is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the third Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont. Her pioneering comic strip about the lives of a group of lesbian friends, Dykes to Watch Out For, ran from 1983 to 2008 and was syndicated in over fifty alternative papers, including Vermont’s Seven Days.
In 2006, Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller and the basis of the Tony-award winning musical of the same name. Bechdel followed up in 2012 with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which follows her relationship with her mother, girlfriends, therapists, and her exploration of psychoanalytic theory.
In 2020 it was announced that Fun Home would be made into a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Bechdel lives in Bolton, VT with her partner.
