Alison Bechdel Quotes

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?

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

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

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

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

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

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

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

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.

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

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

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.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

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

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.

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

I do lend my books, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating.” --Alison Bechdel

She has given me a way out.

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.

Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.” —Alison Bechdel

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

and what appears to be every graphic memoir ever written – Jeffrey Brown, Craig Thompson, Alison Bechdel, James Kochalka, Lucy Knisley, and tons of others I’ve never seen before.

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

At the danger of waxing nostalgic about the ‘old days,’ I don’t want to be like everyone else. I want acceptance, but I want acceptance of my difference, not my sameness. It’s a funny contract. The cultural machine wants to chew everyone up and turn them into this uniform little substance.

But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

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.

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.

Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.

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

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

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

My research was stimulating but solitary

I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home - someone they've never spoken to but know by sight - I recognized her with a surge of joy.

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.

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.

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.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

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.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not.

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

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there's something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.

What if Icarus hadn't hurtled into the sea? What if he'd inherited his parent's inventive bent? What might have wrought?

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

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].

The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

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

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

I’ll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.

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

...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.

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.

Rich is not writing about transcending this world... But about transforming it. Here, and now. And what hope do we have of changing the world if we can't change our sorry-ass selves? As wisdom tends to do, the poem reveals something very simple that's been here all along: We are not the center of everything. But we are a part of everything.

Most people don't even try to get what they want because of the painful reckoning with their parents it entails.

There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.

My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage. There was no story, for example, of how they met.

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.

You can't live and write at the same time.

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

What's lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself.

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.

I remember feeling very angry at Betty Friedan." AB: What? Why? "Well... she hated housework and wanted women to be independent, but then she's hire other women to do her housework.

It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. 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 steaming 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.

I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it; two, two women talking to each other, and three, talking about something besides a man

Over the course of my life, as I have made my Houdini-like escapes from one self-imposed constraint after another, a question haunts me with increasing insistence. How many levels does this game have?

[on Stonewall Inn] And while I acknowledge the absurdity of claiming a connection to that mythologized flashpoint...might not a lingering vibration, a quantum of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air?

Your anxiety attach in the church sounds like a compromise formation. A what? Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocense. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. So the compromise is anxiety.

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.

Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history: An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way. And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role. "This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, guaranteed him a measure of existential...[as quoted by Alice Miller]

Here's the vital core of Winnicott's theory: The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction. If the object doesn't survive, it will remain internal, a projection of the subject's self. If the object survives destruction, the subject can see it as separate.

The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequity. Does a film have at least two named women in it, talking to each other, about something other than a man? A depressingly large number of films and shows fail the test. But it does more than scold. It suggests an alternate reality—an achievable one—in which women have an equal presence in mass popular culture, and the screen represents more than just the gaze of a (non-feminist) man.

Or maybe he had gotten too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of...I have made use of this technique myself, however, this attempts to access emotions vicariously...eager to detect in my listener that flinch of grief that eluded me.

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.

Why have I spent so many hours of my life--very possibly as many as are actually recommended--exercising?!

It's a world gone mad! Pacifists paying for boot camp! Feminists learning to pole dance! Geeks flipping tractor tires! And the trends keep coming!

My transformation, thanks in part to Adrienne Rich, was easier than hers had been.

No solo éramos invertidos, éramos inversiones el uno del otro

Dicen que el dolor adopta muchas formas, incluyendo la ausencia del dolor.

Our games of baseball—already lethargic affairs—would grind to a half as soon as the ball rolled near a perennial border.

The maples had sheltered the west side of our house for over a hundred years, and left, as fallen trees do, a void so absolute you couldn't possibly have imagined it beforehand.

I don't think your family was a very safe place to be a little girl.

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 did not draw a conscious parallel to my own sexuality, much less my father's. But the immersion -- like green dishwashing liquid bathing a cuticle -- left me supple and open to possibility.

This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her "angry." Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it.

The idea that I caused his death by telling my parents I was a lesbian is perhaps illogical. Causality implies connection, contact of some kind. And however convincing they might be, you can't lay hands on a fictional character.

But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?

In his 1964 talk on feminism, Winnicott says something he's been saying all along. "...We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning everyone was dependent on a woman." Winnicott sees this dependence as the root of misogyny--though he never uses that word. Perhaps, like Woolf with "feminism," he felt plain language was more persuasive. "The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on a woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be turned into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached.

I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever.

From their example, I learnt quickly to feed myself. It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our geniuses, the more isolated we grew...And indeed, if our family was a sort of artists' colony, could it not be even more accurately described as a mildly autistic colony? Our selves were all we had.

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain. 'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

At thirteen, I was so paralyzed with self-consciousness that sometimes I'd get home from school and realize I hadn't spoken out loud all day. Later, I would blame my social awkwardness on my homosexuality. But now I speculate that being a lesbian actually saved me... If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not. Though perhaps Camus' definition of the absurd—that the universe is irrational and human life meaningless—applies here as well. [quoting from The Myth of Sisyphus: The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.]