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Alison Bechdel's Family Life? Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel puts elements of a difficult childhood into her art.
Alison Bechdel puts elements of a difficult childhood into her art.

Comic strip artist Alison Bechdel writes and illustrates the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For.

She has now created a memoir in comic strip form that revisits her youth and her relationship with her sometimes distant father, Bruce, a high school English teacher.

The two often had trouble communicating, and they talked about literature as a way to relate. Her father died when she was almost twenty, an incident she believes was a suicide.

The setting for most of the memoir is a large, Gothic revival house, a home that caused Bechdel to identify with The Addams Family.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Liane Hansen
Liane Hansen has been the host of NPR's award-winning Weekend Edition Sunday for 20 years. She brings to her position an extensive background in broadcast journalism, including work as a radio producer, reporter, and on-air host at both the local and national level. The program has covered such breaking news stories as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Columbia shuttle tragedy. In 2004, Liane was granted an exclusive interview with former weapons inspector David Kay prior to his report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The show also won the James Beard award for best radio program on food for a report on SPAM.