Alison Bechdel’s new book Spent is like nothing she’s ever done before — and it’s like everything she’s done before all at the same time. A work of auto-fiction, Spent is about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who is writing a book about her relationship to money during the pandemic and whose closest friends are characters last seen in Bechdel’s iconic comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. This version of Alison lives on a goat farm with her partner Holly, has a Republican sister driving her crazy, and is frustrated with the TV show adaptation of her memoir about her taxidermist father. It’s one step away from truth and after sharing so much in three memoirs over the past two decades, that’s exactly how Bechdel likes it.

I spoke with Bechdel about her experience of oblique fame, the joy of returning to old characters, and how cis gay people of a certain age and privilege need to meet this moment.

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Drew: I want to start by talking about fame. The book is interested in a lot of different types of fame and something I often think about is gay fame vs. mainstream fame. How has your relationship to fame changed over the years and what aspects of that did you want to capture in the book?

Alison: The book originated as an inquiry into the effect of money on our lives, as well as privilege or the lack thereof. Mixed in there for me is also this weird journey I’ve had from being very much an outsider in the culture to somehow crossing over and making a living doing this crazy thing that was never— something that was never, you know, a good idea if a person wanted to make a living. [laughs]

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: So that’s just been something I always muse about and wanted to play with in this book. But I somehow never really got into it, because the story and the characters kind of ran away with things.

Drew: Well, one aspect I find interesting is Alison’s partner getting internet famous. That’s such a different kind of fame than the gradual fame that an artist might build. And I don’t want to speak for you, but I imagine there’s a weirdness around the fact that to some people you’re famous as a character in a musical. And to some people you’re just famous as a name that inspired a silly test of whether a movie is feminist.

Alison: The Bechdel Test thing has definitely been a whole weird journey. That’s definitely the thing I’m most well known for among people in general, and that’s funny to me, because it wasn’t even my thing. I didn’t say, “Hey let’s use this old comic strip I did as an actual measure.”

Drew: [laughs] Right.

Alison: Somebody else did that. It was so removed from me. It was kind of odd. But I like that. It’s a good way to be famous. A kind of oblique fame. And likewise, yeah, Fun Home the book was quite successful, but what really tipped it over more into the mainstream was the musical. And I had nothing to do with making the musical! I always feel very awkward when people say, “I loved your play!” I’m always like, well it’s not my play, it’s based on my book, and blah blah blah. Nobody cares. [laughs]

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: But again it’s a kind of oblique fame. Because I’m just a character in that. Or three characters.

I don’t really get recognized out in public anymore, I think because I’m getting old and starting to not look the way I used to look. It’s an alarming stage of life. I just want to give you the heads up that it’s going to come for you too.

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: But I did go through a phase when the musical was playing on broadway where I got recognized a lot on the street. At first, you know, it was sort of gratifying. But it quickly became not so gratifying and more just annoying. I don’t know how actually famous people deal with that. I guess that’s why they have to hide.

Drew: Well, I’ll say this. As much as I love the musical and as meaningful as it was to me, Are You My Mother? was what really made me a fan of yours.

Alison: Oh!

Drew: I started flipping through it in a Barnes & Noble when I was in college and I was like oh my God there are all these things I’ve never thought about. I ended up sitting down in the store to read while scribbling notes in my little notebook and then I eventually just bought it.

Alison: That’s very touching. I love it when people like that book, because not that many people do. [laughs]

Drew: [laughs] I both love it as a book and it was important to me as like a person understanding myself and my experiences.

Alison: I’m so glad.

Drew: Okay, so you’ve obviously worked in memoir several times. What inspired the decision to make this book fiction with a character named Alison surrounded by past characters of yours?

Alison: Honestly, I intended for this book to be a memoir just like my other recent books. But when I sat down to really do the work and I realized that meant I’d have to learn something about economics and probably read Marx, I was like, ugh I can’t. And not only that but to really be honest about my own financial life… Well, that was sort of my mission. I wanted to do that, because there are so many taboos around talking about money and I wanted to dive in there. But when I started to really think about it… [laughs]

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: I didn’t totally want to go there! That’s when this whole alternate plan just popped into my head intact. Instead of writing a memoir about my relationship with money, what if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a memoir about money? That just seemed so much more interesting. I became a lot more excited about that project. I don’t often have those moments of inspiration, of just being flooded by the muse, but this was one of them. All of a sudden I saw those old Dykes to Watch Out For characters were going to be my friends in this new auto-fictional world and it just kind of all came together really quickly.

Drew: Was it fun to revisit those characters?

Alison: It was an unmitigated joy. You know, when I stopped drawing my comic strip in 2008 — wow that was so long ago — people would often ask me if I missed my characters, if I thought about them, and I didn’t. I never did and I felt kind of guilty about that. I was relieved to not think about them after doing it for 25 years. But all of a sudden in this dire new reality that we’re living in, they seemed like the perfect people to hang out with. I caught up with them and tapped into what they might be doing. They’re doing very much what they were doing all along: fighting the good fight and doing it together. Living in their communal house, still going strong in their 60s. I just really loved spending time with them.

Drew: Is your process different book to book? Or are there consistent elements to your process?

Alison: This process was more like when I was writing my comic strip. There are two modalities. One is the comic strip and one is memoir work. For the memoirs I never knew what I was going to find. The whole point of writing the books was to go on some sort of voyage of discovery and answer certain questions about myself. And to do it by not just looking minutely at my own life, but drawing in all this other material. In Fun Home, it was all these literary sources. In Are You My Mother?, it was Winnicott and Virginia Woolf. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, it was the transcendentalists. That was always a really fun research-oriented process that would take forever, because I never knew where anything was going. I kind of just had to wait and see.

But when I was doing my comic strip in the old days, I had a deadline. Every two weeks I had to churn out another episode of this story. And it was also very connected to the real world and what was happening in current events. So for me the comic strip was a way for me to process the world and what was going on. I have a hard time understanding the news. More so now, but it’s always been a challenge. I just don’t really track with it unless, like in the case of the comic strip, I had these characters discuss it with everyone taking slightly different views and through those conversations they kind of work out what’s happening and what we can do about it.

So for this book I was keeping a whole log of the unfolding news. Every day I’d find out the latest horror and keep track of that. And then the story itself would be tied into that moment in time. The characters would be responding to what was happening and that automatically creates some elements of story structure. But the rest of it is just me making shit up and that was really fun, because I don’t get to make anything up when I’m writing a memoir. This was a great feeling of freedom.

Drew: Obviously, there’s some Covid stuff in there. What dates were you working on this?

Alison: I started it in 2022 so in the middle of Covid. It’s hard to say when I finished, because there’s the finishing of the writing, there’s the finishing of the drawing, and it’s all different, but I basically finished it before the election last fall. I had to keep it open-ended, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. So it covers about a two-year period.

Drew: Do you write all the text and then work on the art? Or are you doing both simultaneously?

Alison: I kind of write first although I’m planning and plotting and imagining what the drawings are going to be as I write. But I try to get everything tightly written before I start the drawing, because the drawing is so much work I wouldn’t want to have to redo it if I decided to change something.

Drew: Do you write it like a conventional graphic novel script or do you have your own approach?

Alison: I kind of made up my own system a long time ago which is I write in a drawing program. I write in Adobe Illustrator. I have panel grids all set up and I can go in and start typing my story in word balloons or dialogue boxes.

Drew: I love that.

Alison: It’s like a blank page that then just gets filled in with the drawings.

Drew: That’s really cool.

Alison: Yeah! I made it up. [laughs]

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: I’m sure many other people do it too, but I stumbled upon it, because I love the freedom and flexibility of working digitally and being able to type. If I was drawing all of this by hand, it’d be so time-consuming and it’s already very time-consuming. But yeah this was the solution I discovered.

Drew: Something very present in this book and that I think is such an important part of being in community and being an artist is the ability to make fun of ourselves. When queer people are so regularly mocked by the right, how do you manage to still lovingly mock? Are you thinking about that? Or are you able to cut out those voices and just focus on your work?

Alison: It’s interesting, because when I was first starting out, it never occurred to me that anyone on the right was ever going to see what I was doing. It was purely for us and the gentle ribbing was just among us. I feel like that’s still how I write. If anything, I would like right-leaning people to read my work, because I’m always trying to convey the same thing which is that most of the queer people I know are really nice! They want to save the world! In a serious way! So I would love for a wider ranger of people to see that, but that’s not my mission. It’s entertainment for us.

Drew: When you were working on Dykes to Watch Out For, did you ever face in-community backlash? I mean, queer people can be… sensitive. I’m maybe less interested in rightwing voices than people who are so inundated with those voices that sometimes — not to generalize, but sometimes — there can be a sensitivity toward our own. Is that something you’ve experienced?

Alison: I would constantly be ruffling feathers. Not constantly. But I had some flaps over stuff which was both annoying and also really valuable. I was grateful for it, because I would learn and grow from these exchanges and then it would feed right back into the storyline as I took those discussions under advisement and sometimes changed course.

It always felt like a somewhat communal project. That was the real beauty of doing this episodic format that people could weigh in on as it went along. Inevitably that changed how it went. As I started working on these full length books all about myself, I missed that. I didn’t have that companionship.

Drew: One group that there’s a lot of humor about in this book are the Gen Z queers, and the contrast between them and their parents, specifically around polyamory. What drew you to polyamory as such a main topic for this book about money?

Alison: Yeah, I kept asking myself all through the book, what is the connection between polyamory and money? And there very much is one!

Drew: Definitely.

Alison: And young people are very aware of that. But it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. I had to sort it out.

I’ve never been polyamorous myself, but it’s a model that I have so much admiration for. I’ve been on the edges of it. Like I got involved with someone who was poly and I thought that was going to be the answer. She could have her other girlfriend and then I could have my other girlfriend: my work.

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: That didn’t work out too well. [laughs] But I love that challenge of struggling with one’s feelings of jealousy and for a brief, shining moment seeing how groundless they were. That was a really profound thing to come to understand. I just think it’s a really worthy thing to do. Also everybody is doing it or trying to do it so it made sense to include.

It was really fun to show the difference between the older people and the younger people. For the young people, I think they’re much more motivated by principle. It’s exciting for them to see a way of being in relationship that isn’t possessive and is somehow communal. But for the older people it’s more about the sex. [laughs]

Drew: (laughs) Speaking of that storyline, I want to talk about Stuart. When I first started writing for Autostraddle about six years ago, one of the first pieces I was involved in was defending Lisa the lesbian man from the original L Word. Yes, it was product of its time, maybe not perfect, but there was something about that character that felt trans woman-coded—

Alison: Wait, who is this character?

Drew: [laughs] Sorry, I’m just like, surely you remember this minor character from the first season of The L Word. Alice starts dating this man who wants to be identified with lesbianism and is like, yes, I’m a man, but I’m not straight, I’m a lesbian, and I just want to listen to Indigo Girls and I want to wear a strap-on.

Alison: Oh I never saw that.

Drew: Did you not watch The L Word?

Alison: I didn’t really. I didn’t have whatever fancy cable thing it was on.

Drew: That’s so— I mean— I guess some people would say you’re missing out, but I think at this point you’re probably okay. But yeah that was a subplot—

Alison: Was it offensive? It sounds like it was…

Drew: Oh yeah! And the Autostraddle piece was a bunch of different trans writers looking back on it and plenty of people hated it. I guess to me it showed a gender and sexuality variance that the show and mainstream media in general at the time wasn’t really engaging with. So even though it was played as a joke, there was something that felt better to me about it than some of the more official trans storylines that happen later. Maybe a joke can have more honesty to it than a certain kind of overly direct approach.

But I did think about this character when reading Stuart’s storyline in Spent. In the six years since I wrote my part of that piece, I’m more settled in my own identity and have had more time to be exhausted by the gay internet, so I’m less attached to the idea of trying to project a gender or sexuality onto a character. So with Stuart, I just felt an enjoyment in seeing the wide variety of different ways that people can be regardless of what labels they choose and what genders they have and what bodies they have. Even if Stuart is forever a cis straight man who is just drawn to this community and these ways of having sex, what do you think is gained by welcoming a wide variety of genders and experiences into dyke community? And when you were working on this book with these old characters, what was the pull to have Stuart come back and be so prominent?

Alison: As you were saying all this, I started worrying, oh my God is Stuart’s character offensive?

Drew: No! I don’t think so at all!

Alison: I love Stuart. And I’ve always had to fight the urge to make him even more prominent. Back when I was writing the comic strip, I found myself giving this straight white man the limelight, because it was just so easy to write for Stuart. He began usurping the territory of the women. He became the new Mo in a way, and once I realized that I felt bad! It wasn’t like I felt like I needed to have a man. It was just like, oh Stuart! Oh Ginger! All these people! I want to hang with you.

You know, people go on and on about this crisis of masculinity in the culture, but I’ve always had plenty of models of people being men in very positive ways. And one of those ways is Stuart.

Drew: Also, I mean, most queer women communities and friend groups have a lot of bisexual people, so cis men show up and, yeah, the good ones can hang.

Alison: Well, actually, when you asked earlier about pushback from the community, all of the ways the world of Dykes expanded in terms of gender was because of that engagement. People were like oh you need a bisexual character. I would hear those things and it was part of what made it happen.

Drew: Even now I see old work of yours shared in a pro-trans context. Like the one where the masc cis woman is called out in the bathroom instead of the trans woman.

Alison: I don’t think that’s mine?

Drew: It’s not?? It’s your characters and always credited to you…

Alison: That’s a good premise though.

Drew: Wow, okay, interesting.

Alison: I don’t think?

Drew: Wait, I need to look this up and send it to you.

Alison: I did do something for a Leslie Fienberg book… I don’t know. I’m a thousand years old. I can’t keep track anymore.

Drew: [looking up the comic strip] It’s so funny that this person on Reddit is saying this is a comic strip from the creator of the Bechdel Test.

[sends the link]

Alison: Oh yeah that is me!

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: Yes, okay, this was created for the book Transgender Warriors by Leslie Fienberg. Jillian was a character in the strip too. But wow, yeah, I totally forgot about this!

Drew: I do love that you’ve been working for so long that yeah, of course, you can’t keep track of everything you’ve done.

Alison: Yeah I hadn’t seen that in a long time.

Drew: Okay, so your fictional self in this book works on a goat farm. What’s your real-life relationship to nature?

Alison: I do live in the country — I live in the woods — but not on a farm. And it is absolutely life-sustaining for me. I have to be able to walk out of my house and into the woods or I will shrivel up and die. Nature is very much a force in the story as we go through the seasons and see the landscape change and see the animals get pregnant and have little goats. The goat thing, I don’t know, I don’t even want goats.

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: Goats are cute, but I would never in a million years get a goat. It just seems like too much work. But the idea of it is fun. And I live in this culture in Vermont where, you know, the really cool people are the farmers. It’s like this cool scene. All the cool kids have goats or sheep or cows. Something that they’re milking. So it was just a way to play around in that culture.

Drew: I’m sure it’s easier for you with your skillset to draw goats than to raise them. [laughs]

Alison: [laughs] But even so, I could’ve drawn better goats if I’d spent more time on them.

Drew: [laughs]

Alison: I wish I’d done a better job. Goats are really hard! They have those crazy eyes and can look like the devil. I couldn’t draw them accurately, because when I drew them with those eyes they just looked too evil.

Drew: That’s really funny.

Alison: I had to fudge them.

Drew: I want to talk about Alison’s sister and the guy with the truck that says Fuck Biden. There’s this tension that pops up throughout the book with people whose politics appear misaligned with their values or at least what they think are their values. How do you work through that gap either in life or your work? So many people who support politicians and legislation that hurts us don’t even seem to grasp the gravity of it.

Alison: They don’t. That’s what I wanted to show. Most of us on the left interact with at least some people somewhere who are on the right. I know I have Trump people in my family and we just don’t talk about that. I mean, I’ve tried and it just goes really badly. So what do you do with that? For me, I’m just putting out perhaps an overly optimistic view of things which is that we can somehow be civil to one another even if they are fascist lunatics. You can’t really talk to that guy with the Fuck Biden sticker, but if you do a good chainsaw sharpening video maybe you’ll connect with him that way? And then he sees your humanity.

Drew: I’m interested, in part, because I don’t have an answer myself. I’m jealous sometimes of people who seem to very easily say if people believe any of these things we should cut them out and I’m also jealous of people of people who are like no we need to talk and engage. I feel constantly in between where I’m like both of those sound like the wrong approach. So I just sort of waffle from situation to situation. It’s so pervasive. It’s daunting.

Alison: I don’t know either. In the book, I play with different ways it might happen. Like Alison with her rightwing sister. That was really fun to write, because they’re basically the same person except Alison has short hair and Sheila has long hair and, of course, Sheila lives in Pennsylvania and is very conservative. But I wanted to explore their connections as much as their differences.

Drew: That character is fictional, yeah?

Alison: Yes. [laughs]

Drew: When you’re bringing in characters you’ve invented previously, there’s this very clear delineation that they are fictional and this is fictional Alison interacting with them. Was there any hesitation with the sister character of that feeling like a different kind of self-fictionalization?

Alison: I kind of liked throwing a little confusion into the mix. I wouldn’t mind if people thought oh does Alison really have a rightwing sister? In part, because I’ve revealed so much about my life and my family over the years without really thinking about what it would be like down the road for people to know so much about me. So now I like that it sort of casts into doubt how honest I have ever been.

Drew: I loved the subtle changes like the Fun Home of this universe being about taxidermy instead of a funeral parlor. Actually, have you read Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett?

Alison: No, I haven’t heard of it.

Drew: Okay, well, I highly recommend it. It’s a book about a lesbian whose dad has recently died by suicide and was a taxidermist. I think you would like it.

Alison: Oh wow!

Drew: But yeah I really liked those little tweaks to book Alison’s life.

Alison: It was really fun to play with.

Drew: The book is heavy with this desire to do something. And now that we’re in Trump’s second term, I think that desire is felt somehow even more for a lot of people. Did working on this book provide any answers for you? Did it change how you want to spend your time or your money?

Alison: I think what happens to Alison in the book happened to me as I was working on the book. Part of what I was hoping to address when it was going to be a memoir about money were the ways money inevitably corrupts you. In my case, I felt like I’d gotten very far from my youthful idealism. The more famous I got, the more money I made, it’s so easy to get insulated from real life. And isolated. I feel like I’ve gotten quite isolated in my old age and success. It’s a terrible feeling. So finding these other characters and reuniting with them reminded me that all these people are still here. The community is still here. It’s much more fragmented and different than it was when I was younger. But it’s still here and there are still people doing this work and I just have to go do it with them. That’s what we all have to do. I mean, young people have already been out there more than people my age. But the rest of us just have to hit the streets.

It feels like — I don’t want to say good timing, because it’s terrible timing, what a terrible thing to befall on this country – but if we can get our shit together and stop all this… I know this sounds very, very naive, but I really think there’s an opportunity to get back on track and save this fallen world. And that’s going to require coming together and not living in our isolated, hermetically-sealed romantic dyads, but rather to go out and connect.

Drew: Something I like in the book is that, yes, there’s Alison’s sister, and there’s the thread of communicating with people on the right, but there’s also a wide variety within the queer liberal and leftist characters. Something I think about a lot is that within queer community, there are a lot of different people with a lot of different beliefs with a lot of different approaches to those beliefs. As you were saying, it’s fractured. I love the moment when the younger characters are breaking the law to get abortion pills across state lines and their mom says she’s proud of them but also it risks her more within-the-system work to be doing that in her house. There are all these different approaches. So I like what you’re saying and I like it from the perspective of not palling around with Republicans but instead actually listening to the different perspectives on the left.

Alison: Totally. And I feel like we have not done a great job at that. As a movement, many of us have become very complacent. Gay people got their rights and then a lot of people just checked out and were like we’ll just let the trans people save themselves. No! There was so much more to do. With climate, for people of color. Whatever happened to solidarity and coalition? I feel like this is a chance to go back and do that right.

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Spent is now available.