Presented in partnership with University of Iowa Lecture Committee

“American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is best known for her long-running, award-winning comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which was first published in 1983. The comic strip became a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the world. Ms. Magazine dubbed this generational chronicle “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.”

Her work focuses on the overlap of political and personal spheres, the relationship of the self to the world outside. In the New York Times Book Review write-up of her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, Katie Roiphe wrote, “There’s a lucidity to Bechdel’s work that in certain ways … bears more resemblance to poetry than to the dense, wordy introspection of most prose memoirs. The book delivers lightning bolts of revelation, maps of insight and visual snapshots of family entanglements in a singularly beautiful style.”

Time magazine named her book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic the Best Book of 2006, describing the tightly architected investigation into her closeted bisexual father’s suicide “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home was adapted into a musical in 2015 and was nominated for five Tony Awards including “Best Musical.”