How Alison Bechdel Wrote a Memoir That Wasn't a Memoir

Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, David Plotz talked with author Alison Bechdel about her new book, Spent . They discussed how Bechdel turned a memoir into a not-so fictional novel.

This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

David Plotz: So, what is Spent , what is it about? Why did you write it?

Allison Bechdel: It is a novel, or I guess I'm thinking of it as a kind of auto fiction since it features a character who looks very much like me and has my name. But it didn't start out that way. It started out to be a memoir, like a more kind of serious memoir project about money and just about what it's like to live in a Capitalist system, and especially one that has run so wildly amok. Money just seems like that big elephant in the room right now that's wrecked everything.

So, I wanted to investigate it, but then I sat down to write a memoir and realized, “Oh my god, I'm going to have to read about economics, too bad I never studied that in college. Too bad I was reading semiotics instead, and now I know nothing about how the world works.” I didn't want to do all that research. So, I felt like, I had a moment of hopeless panic, like, “Oh my god, now what?” And then I realized, “Oh, it'll be much more fun to write a book about someone who's trying to write that money memoir and failing.” So that's what happened.

As you say, there's a doppelganger, Alison McDowell, who I was looking at, she has more wrinkles than you do. You've made her less youthful and energetic as you yourself, which is interesting that you've made her more worn down.

You have this doppelganger character who has a partner who has the same name as your partner. This doppelganger character has also written a very popular memoir of her own childhood, but in this case, it's not Fun Home , it's Death and Taxidermy , and she also lives in rural Vermont. So how is doppelganger Allison, you, and how is she not you?

She's pretty much all me. At first, I thought I was exaggerating her quirks and foibles a bit, but I think it's actually a quite accurate representation of all my neuroses. She's trying to concentrate. She's trying to do creative work in this world that is rapidly going off the rails, and it's difficult. First, she's trying to write her memoir and then she's watching her, the memoir she wrote, Death and Taxidermy has been turned into a prestige TV series, which Allison has no control over, and that too is going off the rails. The showrunner is just taking great liberties with Allison's story and the whole idea of ​​her book.

Allison is like a vegetarian activist. She used to write a comic strip called “Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For”, and the show is just like they're having Allison eat a hamburger, and she's just lost control of her story. So, she decides the next thing she's going to do is make her own TV show where she can have control. So, she keeps getting distracted from one project with another project and onto another project, which is very much how I have felt over the past 10 years, just can barely summon focus for three minutes at a time.

As you say, this is, Allison in Spent is sort of grappling with what it is to try to make art in a really terrible world, in a world where bad things keep happening. There's sort of a little bit of, I'm not sure what, almost a chorus of bad news that you see flitting through the book headlines here and there. But now that your book comes out in a world that is much worse than it was when you were working on it and there's a funniness and lightness in your novel, but it does not feel like this is not a funny light moment in the world, how do you make sense of the fact the world's actually much worse than the world that you were imagining, which was still pretty bad?

In a way, yeah, things are much worse than they were when I was working on the book, but all of that was still in place. It was still, I didn't know who was going to win this election. I had to finish the book before I knew. I had to keep it intentionally open-ended for any possibility. And in truth, everything that is happening now was happening then. And if Harris had won, those terrible things would still be happening, not as aggressively or in broad daylight as they are now, but they would still be happening. So that discontinuity doesn't bother me.

I don't see the discontinuity. I feel like there's been a straight through line from Reagan until this moment, and my characters in this book have been working against it all along. So, there's that kind of continuity. It was very fun. One of the things I did in this book was to mix my real life even more with fiction by adding in my old characters from my comic strip, Dikes to Watch Out For which I stopped writing in 2008 when Obama was on the verge of getting elected and I thought everything was going to be just fine from here on out. Who knew?