Influences

Post by Yussef A

Several different people may have had an influence on Alison Bechdel and her work such as different authors and cartoonists, and possibly her father. After reading Fun Home, you are educated on what type of person Alison’s father was. There was a lot about him, but what can be used as important information as to why he could have been an influence on Alison’s work could be the fact that he was an English teacher who had a lot of love and passion for books and writers like Fitzgerald. Throughout the memoir, you would see her father sitting in his library with a large bookcase behind him, and you could tell he would actually read these books because of Alison’s comment “My father’s books--the hardbound ones with their ragged dust jackets, the paperbacks with their creased spines--had clearly been read.” (Bechdel, p. 84) Not only would he read books, but he would offer books to his high school students that he found promising, in hopes it would help them intellectually or morally. So, all of this about her father may have potentially inspired or influenced Alison in a way.

                                                                           (p. 84)

Also from Fun Home, Charles Addams may have been an influence to Alison because of how she would go through his cartoons even before she was able to read, and I believe Alison's drawings in Fun Home had a similar look to his.

                                                                             (p. 34)

                                                                                                                     
From an interview on The New York Times, I was able to learn that both authors and cartoonists have had an equal influence on Alison. Authors like James Joyce, Donald Winnicott, and Virginia Woolf, as well as cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Mad Magazine, Edward Gorey, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Norman Rockwell, have all equally given Alison the knowledge of her “aesthetic sensibilities” (Williams, 2012 May 10).

I also came across a YouTube video in which Alison was asked a few questions by - and one of them was if there was any work or writer that had an influence on her, and she chose the book Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Alison said that it was a very formative book since it was sort of a book of being a writer, and Alison grew up to be a writer (IOWA City UNESCO City of Literature, 2010 December 27).

The author James Joyce was mentioned a number of times in Fun Home, so I believe he had to be an influence on Alison. Here's a link talking about James Joyce in Fun Home:
https://www.gradesaver.com/fun-home/study-guide/james-joyce

Post Created by Yussef

References

Bechdel, A. (2006). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin

[IOWA City UNESCO City of Literature]. (2010, December 27). Writers On The Fly: Alison Bechdel [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT-JjXe8a4I

Williams, J. (2012, May 10). Alison Bechdel Talks About Drawing, Writing, Family and Shame. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/alison-bechdel-talks-about-drawing-writing-family-and-shame/