
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 âFun Homeâ and âAre You My Mother?â Her new book, âSpent,â is a graphic novel â but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this weekâs podcast.
âOver 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,â Bechdel says. âI just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. Itâs all right there. Itâs served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, Youâre able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, donât you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you canât. Youâve got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring."
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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. 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. Also, for more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.