
Podcast: Ep544: 'Fun Home' Author Alison Bechdel on Her New Graphic Novel
May 23, 2025
Author(s): The New York Times
Podcast: The Book Review
1 / 1'Fun Home' Author Alison Bechdel on Her New Graphic Novel
- 1. 'Fun Home' Author Alison Bechdel on Her New Graphic Novel
About
Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of a long-running alt-weekly comic strip before jumping to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs āFun Homeā and āAre You My Mother?ā Her new book, āSpent,ā is a graphic novel ā but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this weekās podcast. āOver the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,ā Bechdel says. āI just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. Itās all right there. Itās served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, Youāre able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, donāt you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you canāt. Youāve got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring." Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Podcast

The New York Times
The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp