YouSaid · the spoken record

Alison Bechdel

lines on the record: 45
first: 2017-02-08
most recent: 2017-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Do really love my life, and if I, you know, even if you gave me a billion dollars to do something else, I don't think I would. But you're saying if I have to pick something. I think it would be... I just have this image of could I just take trapeze classes?”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, some of them are mad at me. Some of them don't think my dad was really gay. Many of them are actually kind of amazing and they've come to see the play and they talk to me about it and they come out of the play sobbing. It's very moving to see that.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I like to think I would have been More honest, I tried to be as honest as I could, but I feel like I still was soft pedaling things in the book about my mother. I don't know. Sorry. I'm not sure it might not have been any different. It's weird too because my parents' friends, many of them are still alive and I often hear from them and they all have their own versions of things and”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's an excellent question. You know, because it was very, I was very aware of her presence, not just what she was going to think of the book, but her editorial presence, because she was a writer, a thwarted writer, and a lot of my struggle was just being able to get her out of my head as an oppressive editorial voice. But if she had, you know, The interesting thing is as I was writing the second book, the memoir about her, she actually was, very weirdly she was diagnosed with cancer right when Funhome was published, like the week I was off on my book tour. And she lived for seven more years and saw the book about her, but I never knew if she was going to live to see it, which was very strange too, because there were different books I could have written. But you're asking what would have been different.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, it was really, really hard. I said it took me seven years to write that book mostly because I was just moving stuff around all the time and didn't know how to write a book. I knew how to write a comic strip, but that was a very small, contained thing. It was just an organic process of I realized I didn't just want to tell the story of what happened to me. That's not really that interesting. It's just like, but it was my ideas and feelings about what happened to me. And to do that, I had to break it apart chronologically and talk about it more thematically. So that meant the time got all screwed up.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very friendly and talked to her and took us healthy with her. But it's weird. Like all of a sudden, your life is interrupted by this bizarre force. I'm not really complaining. Of course, it's a really good thing, but it's just odd.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, okay, I'm totally deleting that app. Anyhow, I was waiting for this car. This dyke pulled up in a car and I thought, oh, that must be my driver. And no, she was just like some random lesbian who's identified me on the street and jumped out of her car screaming I mean, it's really weird. Do you really weird? Do you like that? No, I really don't like it. I mean, it's novel at first for a while, but it's quite draining and No, but she almost got hit by the car that was coming to pick me up.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, it's very strange. I mean, oh my God, I was waiting outside for an Uber today. Oh, really Because of what they did about people going to the airports yesterday? Okay. Okay, I got to get the other one. Thank you. But no, this is really cool. That's a kind of activism, right? I mean, it's making your values known.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is hard to do, it's surprisingly hard to do. Like, I shouldn't be sitting here talking in San Francisco. I should be home working.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we had to carve the rocks and all that. Real trouble You do a really good job, I think, of being a creative person in our society because you work, you really work, and you have for years. And now that fame has come to you, you actually have retreated in order to remain creative. And that's very hard to do.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just have to say, Lamars is a pioneering women's cartoonist. of the women's comics days, the old real underground days. So thank you. I'm glad you're here”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am. Think about it. Well, you know, it's interesting when you have kids, I have two kids, when you start to look at those movies, like you look at a movie like Finding Nemo, how many women are in the ocean And she's crazy. Alan, it's always Alan, right? Yeah, it's always a crazy lesbian. Okay, right here.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it started with women in film school who were being told the exact opposite. If you want to sell a movie to Hollywood, don't put more than two women in it, etc. So it's just taken on this weird life. This real index of how the culture has changed. It was a very fringe marginal thing in the 80s, and now it's become this more mainstream discussion, which is amazing.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is so funny. The Bechtel test is the thing I'm really most well known for. That's okay. And it's not even my thing. It's just gotten attached to my name. It's actually from a very, very old dikes to watch out for episode from the 80s about two women trying to figure out what movie to go to. And one of them says, I can only see a movie if it has more than two women characters in it who talk to each other about something besides a man. And I stole that from a friend of mine. She had just told me this story and I didn't have an idea for my strip, so I just put that in my comic strip. And it was just like lesbian feminist joke of the 80s, the kind of stuff we were all saying to each other. And it just disappeared. But then 20 years later, these young feminists resurrected it.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I know how they went about finding them? I don't. It would have been fun to sit in on the casting, though. I do know the story of Kate Schindel, who you didn't see today because her understudy played my character today, but Kate Schindel, who was a former Miss America. She normally plays Allison in this production, and she got the part because she came to see the show on Broadway and just really was excited by it and said, I want to do this and then she tried out and she's doing it. But I don't really know how the theater stuff works. In high school, I was like on the stage crew. I didn't hang out with the actor kids. They were too cool.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think for me we have to do the things that we're best at and the things that we love doing. I think just finding joy in the world I think is really politically important. If people are doing what they're happy doing, I don't mean like slacking off and getting drunk, but really doing the thing that makes you feel alive and engaged. Like that's what you should be doing, whatever it is”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what do you do? Last question What are you doing to, besides despair, is there any action as an artist or a person do you think people should take, you don't have to give advice to people or anything like that, but I'm asking that?”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does it remind you of, it just was reminded me the other day, because for some reason Philadelphia was on TV last night and I watched, I hadn't seen it since it came out, really. And it reminds me a little bit of that time, and you remember that. You know, I remember being on the mall and doing the AIDS quilt and stuff like that. And I do remember the feeling of great despair when that was all happening. People were dying and it felt like that. And then fast forward today.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My favorite one from DC was this long quote from Hannah Arendt. It was like 500 words on a placard and I can't tell you what it said, but it was really good. But I do feel part of my political responsibility right now is not to give in to despair. It's hard. Just, you know, here we all are together. There's so many people who are the good guys, and I feel very heartened by that. And I think it's going to be obviously a long slog, but I think we're going to do it.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you see there was this really funny sign yesterday? It was first they came for the Muslims and we said, not today motherfuckers So I feel, you know”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every day. It's like a kick in the stomach. I know. Yesterday morning was just abysmal, but then by the end of the day, all these demonstrations at the airports, all those lawyers coming out.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like just being a particle in this giant organism that you didn't even know where it was going or what was happening. And there was something about just being there with my body, with all these other bodies in that place that felt like this might really happen. We might be really getting our shit together at long last”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm trying not to succumb to despair and the resistance is really helping me to do that. I went to the March on Washington last week. It was really transformative. I've never been, I mean, I've been to a lot of big marches and demonstrations, but I've never been in a crowd like that. It was like...”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No fans. No, I did, but I got really burnt out on it. Just because, you know, as Funhome, the juggernaut of Funhome kept going, I started to feel finally at last overexposed, you know? I took a while, but I reached my threshold. It was like, I don't really need to be online talking to people all day about what I'm doing. What's seductive for a while though? I can see what people do.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But no, I started doing comics in the 80s, like before there was anything digital. And I adopted stuff as it came along. You know, I got a graphic tablet and I got Photoshop and I got a digital camera. The camera really transformed my work a lot because I could, I used to make little quick reference sketches for my drawings or I'd look at myself in the mirror or if it was a really complicated scene I would take a Polaroid which was really expensive. It was like a dollar for every Polaroid you took. But once you could take digital photos it was endless. You could take as many free pictures as you wanted and I did that and for like all the scenes in funhome I posed for all the characters. Oh wow, too obsessive.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I live in the woods outside of Burlington. I get up, I do some yoga, I try to do some seven minute workout. And then I go sit in my office on my computer writing this crazy book”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's called the secret to superhuman strength. Oh, nice. That was like a comic book ad I saw as a kid that sucked me in and I sent away for it. I really, really wanted this secret to superhero human strength. And it was this crazy manual for a weird martial art that I couldn't possibly understand. Very disappointing.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm working on a memoir about physical fitness and mortality. And that feels so frivolous given what's happening around us.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I want to weigh in. And I've gone off into these weirdly personal things since doing the comic strip doing these family memoirs and working on another kind of memoir now, it does all start to seem a little bit.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, God has left the building. But after this election, I suddenly could hear and see them and felt this tremendous need for my own sanity to bring them back and try and write about what was happening in the moment. Thank you. Because that's what I would use the comic strip for myself, was to make sense of the chaotic world, and I never needed it more than last November. And I wish I could keep doing it. I hope to keep doing a few more episodes, but it's incredibly time-consuming.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I was really ground down to a pulp by writing about the Bush administration. And B, I just couldn't keep doing it and do the other things I wanted to do. I'd been doing it at that point for 25 years and I felt like it was now I could stopping point. I didn't intend to stop. I was going to take a break, but then I just realized, yeah, I was done. And people over the years would talk to me and say, oh, I miss your comic strip. What are the characters up to? What do they think of Obama? And I would have this, again, another disappointing response, which was, I don't know, I have no idea. Because I wasn't really thinking about them. I was very relieved to just be done.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, essentially. I stopped just coincidentally at the end of the Bush administration, just during the primaries when it was Hillary and Obama.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. But it was, you know, I feel like if she had not died seeing this play would have surely killed her. I think it would have... I mean, I think it would have been very painful, obviously in some ways, but also in another way, like she didn't like being turned into a character in a book, and she certainly, well, she might have had mixed feelings about being turned into a character on the stage because she was actually an actress. She did summer stock theater when I was growing up. So I think there was a way she might have actually been delighted by all of this.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is the sort of sad, but in some ways not thing. My mother did not ever see the place. She died the year that it opened off Broadway. And she knew what was happening. And she would say things to me like, well, I can't wait to see the reviews.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know that feeling. She's fantastic You won't go into the coming out story because she doesn't come out well on that one, the original one. She's great now. She's great now. Redemption story. Anyway, so how did your mother react now? How does she feel about this?”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's something that my mother hardly appears at all in the book Funhau because I was so terrified. I knew she was going to be reading it. So I tried to keep her out of it as much as I could.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is kind of, it was not intended to be, but it turned out that way. But it's a memoir about my mother and also in an odd way, a memoir about the process of writing Fun Home. And navigating that with my mother It was none too keen on it. How”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I dissociate a little bit. It's like The first time I saw it, it was so powerful. And I don't know, it's like seeing an amazing view. Like the first time you see it, you can't believe it and you just have this physical visceral reaction. But then you get used to it. So it's very sad, but I've kind of gotten used to it. It's like listening to an amazing song over and over until you can't really hear it. So that's not a very exciting answer, I'm sorry, but it's the true answer.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You wish you had. I wish I had, yeah. So when you see it now, like you were in the audience, I don't know if you realized she was sitting in the audience, how does it feel to watch this? Because it is, you know, it's completely about you and your life in a very difficult relationship with your father and a complicated relationship.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go to see these early workshops and things and gave them feedback, which they were very kind about listening to, and took some of it, I think. The thing is, the whole team, Lisa Crone, the writer, Janine Tauri, the composer, and Sam Gold, who directed it were kind of amazing in the way that they respected the fact that this was about my real family. And they, you know, obviously they took lots of liberties. They made stuff up. My family didn't really dance around like the partridge family.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you have any hand in writing any of the lyrics or zero? Zero. So they just took your work, which was illustrated novel and then made it into this. When you heard it for the person, was it hard letting go of the artistic product that you made to create this? Did you have suggestions or differences?”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I said yes to it because I knew Lisa and trusted her and also it felt like so alien, so like such a different form that I could let go of it. I didn't have any involvement. It was like I turned over all of my creative rights to this team. And then time went by. Years went by and I didn't hear anything about it. And I started to wonder, is this really happening? But maybe four years later they did a workshop and I got a tape of the CD of the songs of actors performing these songs and it was just staggered me. I don't know what I had been expecting. You know, I knew they were doing this, but when I actually heard it, it was so powerful.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I thought it was just nuts. I couldn't imagine how it would become a musical. But I didn't know much about musicals then. You know, I was just thinking of guys and dolls or something. Couldn't quite picture that.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you say to that? Because someone who had a friend I brought with me, I brought all straight people in a gay. And she said when they read the book, the gay couldn't believe it was going to be a musical. No, I thought.”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a very long journey from, well, the book itself was a long journey. It took me like seven years to write it, and I didn't even begin it till I was almost 40, as you saw in the story. It took a long time. It was sort of torturous watching the character who plays me going through her creative suffering, because that's just how I work. I still go through that every day. So then after the book came out, very early on there was this offer to turn it into a musical, Lisa Crone attached to this project of wanting to turn my book into a musical, which I thought was really”
2017-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Fun Home' author Alison Bechdel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT