As part of The College Reads! program, the College of Charleston will present an evening with award-winning cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel on October 24, 2013. The lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in the TD Arena. The event is free and open to the public.
Bechdel’s novel “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” was The College Reads! book for the 2013-2014 school year. Published in 2006, this award-winning book is a memoir in the form of a graphic novel.
“Fun Home” is a coming of age story centered on Bechdel’s complex relationship with her father, a high school English teacher and director of the town funeral home (the “Fun Home”). In college, Alison comes out as a lesbian and learns her father is gay. By retelling her story, she is able to come to terms with herself, her sexual identity, and her relationship with her father.
Bechdel is also known for the long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
Her most recent work, “Are You My Mother,” complements “Fun Home,” with reflections on her fraught, complex relationship with her mother.
Beyond her self-syndicated comics and memoirs, Bechdel has drawn for Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review and U.K. literary magazine Granta. She was awarded a 2012-13 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts and edited “Best American Comics 2011.”
Other honors include a seat on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary in 2006, a fellowship at the University of Chicago and the “Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement”, which honors LGBT writers.
