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I write less here on this blog than I used to. The conversation I am having is mostly with myself. When my son calls and asks how I am—when friends ask—I have no news, no funny anecdotes, I am mostly absent. Perched on the edge.

I am reading, I am writing, I am reading more. I am reading memoirs or novels that might have been memoirs or books on the meaning of story. Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls). Alison Bechdel (Are You My Mother?). Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts and Bluets). Decca Aitkenhead (All At Sea). Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness). Heidi Julavits (The Folded Clock). Ta-Nehesi Coates (again). Claudia Rankine (again). Joan Silber (The Art of Time in Fiction).

Every time I slip inside these books I am living, for a spell, as other. Walking, as they say, in others' shoes.

The news is crisis. It is a madness that requires us to absent ourselves from ourselves so that we might occupy the heart and mind of others. White. Blue. Black. Whatever color it is: take your own off, put another on, and see. Feel. Think.

Two weeks ago I taught memoir to a group of six who, in their glorious differences, were gorgeously one. Tonight we will have dinner with friends who know and love us. In between I am seeking, in the books I read, a path toward greater empathy and knowing. So that when I return to me I'll be bigger than I was. More capable of making some kind of earthly difference.

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Frankly, we need this book.

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I was crying or almost crying for most of Fun Home: The Musical — I already loved Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, and I've always been a sucker for the way musicals make melodrama catchy. The song that got me most was "Ring of Keys," a song about a primal moment of identification: Sydney Lucas, playing [...]

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Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Fun Home, the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel won five TOny Wards on Saundya, including Best Musical, capping a road of critical triumph for the show. IN addition to Best Musical, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron won Best Original Score, Kron won for Best Book of a Musical, Sam Gold won for Best Direction of a Musical, and Michael Cerveris won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical.

I was lucky enough to see the show in its opening week and it was an extraordinary night of theater, with three actors portraying Bechdel at various points in her life, Beth Malone Emily Skeggs and Sydney Lucas.

The above photo from the Times shows Bechdel ‘s emotion at the winning moment. Congrats to her for turning her family history into a story that has touched so many people in two mediums.

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The Fun Home musical has earned 12 Tony nominations. This project, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, premiered with a production at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway.

The New York Times reports that Fun Home will be considered for this prestigious award in the following categories: Best Musical, Best Leading Actor in a Musical, Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics), Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Best Scenic Design of a Musical, Best Lighting Design of a Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, and Best Orchestrations. Click here to watch a montage video.

Some of the other book-inspired theatrical adaptations that also earned recognition include Wolf Hall: Parts 1 &2 (eight nominations) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (six nominations). The winners will be announced at a ceremony set to take place at Radio City Musical Hall on June 7th. (via USAToday)

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The Tony Awards nominations are out today, honoring the best on Broadway, and Fun Home tied for most nominations with 12 (An American in Paris also got 12.) The musical, based on the Alison Bechdel graphic novel, was nominated for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Book, Best Director, Best Actor in a Musical (Michael Cerveris), Best Actress in a Musical (Beth Malone), three in the Best Featured Actress category ( Judy Kuhn, Sydney Lucas and Emily Skeggs,) Best Scenic Design, Best Lighting Design and Best Orchestration.

I was lucky enough to see this last week, and its deserving of every honor it gets, a truly mesmerizing and heartbreaking night of theater. If I had to pick one performance to call out it would be 12 year old Sydney Lucas, who is simply astonishing as Small Allison. Alison Bechdel’s memoir about her family life, family secrets, coming out and dealing with the past has achieved a cultural significance that no graphic novel save Maus has ever come close to.

Bechdel drew a brief but powerful coda to the Fun Home experience as a webcomic for Vulture.

And the NY Times profiles her and the strange experience of seeing your life turned into a musical::

“She is a curious human being, and she’s curious about herself most of all,” Ms. Malone said of Ms. Bechdel. “Even her look is all about telling the truth — no ornamentation, nothing pretty. She hates lies — lies and embellishments are what got her dad killed.”

Ms. Bechdel has no formal role in creating the musical, but checks in often, answers questions by email and offers the periodic note. She asked them to change one sentence, to make clear that her father, a fastidious home restorer and antiques collector, had used real William Morris wallpaper, and not an imitation.

 

 

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Fun Home opened on Broadway last night and the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic novel won rave reviews. The show stars Beth Malone, Emily Skeggs and Sydney Lucas (above) as Bechdel at various ages, and Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Oscar Williams as the rest of the Bechdel family.

A sampling:

Ben Brantley in the NY Times:

“Fun Home” knows where you live. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway. Yet this impeccably shaded portrait of a girl and her father, which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter.

Choose from the most used tags
Variety:

New! Fresh! Original! We toss those kudos around a lot in this business. (It’s like calling everyone “darling.”) But “Fun Home” really earns the praise. Lisa Kron, who wrote both book and lyrics, assembles words and images in unexpected ways to dramatize the bittersweet memoir (based on the 2006 graphic novel by Alison Bechdel) of a grown woman remembering the troubled father she loved in spite of himself.  Sam Gold’s direction brings lucidity to the complex mechanics of staging a story that takes place in three time frames. And Jeanine Tesori’s haunting music doesn’t sound a bit like anyone else’s music.

 

….and so on and so forth. These kind of reviews should give the musical a kickstart, and it should be interesting to see if it runs longer than Spider-Man. I’m seeing it later this week myself and hope to have a few words.

If you want more reviews here’s Elizabeth Vincentelli in the NY Post.

The Hollywood Reporter:
Daily News

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I know I was supposed to be watching the Super Bowl, gauging the plumpedness of those laced-up game balls, but I, beneath my furry blanket on the long stretch of the couch, could not take my eyes from Roz Chast's bestselling, award-winning graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Chast's illustrated story of her parents' later years is devastating and also beautiful and finally heart crunching. An only child of two people who have lived inseparably for years, Chast finds herself challenged by the encroachment of their needs and by the intensifying quirks of her parents' respective personalities. The domineering, almost bullying mother. The talks-too-much-and-can't-fix-a-thing-and-has-a-holy-soul father. They live in a four-room Brooklyn apartment crowded by lifelong detritus. They live increasingly afraid of stepping outside. They rely on Roz, but Roz is hardly enough. And when they finally agree to move into an expensive assisted-living facility, things don't get a whole lot easier.

But like Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, the memoir we'll be unpacking in tomorrow's English 135 at Penn, Chast doesn't allow her confusion to rise to clanging bitterness. Doesn't allow her own disappointment, weariness, frustration, beleaguered condition to transmute into hateful spite. Doesn't tell her story to trump or exploit. She is just telling it as it was—the good she can remember, the empathy she feels, the anger that flashes, the hurt places in between the loved places, the ambiguity she will always feel about her mother and the love she'll always feel for her dad.

It's not a tirade, in other words. It's an archeological dig.

It's here, it's gorgeous, it proves (again, like Edward Hirsch's Gabriel proves, again) how many different ways there are to tell the stories of our lives.

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The Pulitzer Prize nominated musical version of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is coming to Broadway near year and the cast and crew have been announced. Michael Cerveris will be reprising his role as Bruce Bechdel, Alison’s closeted father.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a press preview event yesterday at which Bechdel, composer Jeanine Tesori, lyricist Lisa Kron and director Sam Gold talked about the show and were interviewed by actress Cherry Jones. Sydney Lucas who plays the young version of Alison also sang the song “Ring of Keys” which is based on the scene in the graphic novel where she sees a female delivery person and feels a heretofore unknown but thrilling kinship with her. It was quite a moving performance and surely will be a showstopper. (I didn’t see the original production alas.)

The show is being moved to the Circle in the Square theater where it will be staged in the round. Sounds pretty ground breaking in many ways, and it will definitely get a LOT of attention for a book that was already incredibly ground breaking.

Apropos of nothing, while I was fact checking (yes I do that) this post, I discovered that Alison Bechdel is a black belt in karate. Now you know.

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Studio 360 invites creatives to join in on a “Doodle Dare.” Fun Home author Alison Bechdel drew a doodle to serve as a start point. Participants should use Bechdel’s drawing (pictured on the left) to create a finished composition.

Artists “can use any image-manipulation software, or print it out and go old-school with pens and pencils. The more creative your scenario, the better.” A deadline has been set for November 10, 2014.

Follow this link to learn all the rules. Studio 360 has unveiled a few of the submissions in two posts. What do you think?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Fresh off winning a MacArthur Genius grant, and a months-0ong residency at an Umbrian castle, Alison Bechdel has also announced the subject of her next graphic novel. The Secret to Superhuman Strength will be published in 2017 by Houghton Mifflin. Having explored the psyches of her father in Fun Home and her mother in Are you My Mother, Bechdel turns her laser sight on her self:

“The Secret to Superhuman Strength” is Ms. Bechdel’s third graphic memoir and chronicles her decades long obsession with various fitness and exercise fads, including downhill skiing, uphill skiing, rollerblading, martial arts, running, hiking, weight lifting and home workout videos and currently, yoga. The book will also explore the history of American fitness fads, and Ms. Bechdel’s efforts to rekindle her creativity through exercise, and it is shot through with her signature darkness.

Given America’s obsession with these obsessions, this could be another best seller.

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Alison Bechdel has been named one of this year’s MacArthur Foundation grant winners, often known as a genius grant.

Bechdel was cited for being

…a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives. Bechdel’s command of sequential narrative and her aesthetic as a visual artist was established in her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), which realistically captured the lives of women in the lesbian community as they influenced and were influenced by the important cultural and political events of the day.

The grant confers not only recognition as a leading thinker, but a stipend of 625,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. Recipients are chosen for their future potential and the grant allows is intended to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.”

Bechdel’s achievements in furthering the medium of the graphic novel—and her immense potential for future work—indeed makes her a worthy recipient. As if being a great cartoonist wasn’t enough, the musical adaptation of her book, Fun Home is coming to Broadway next April.

Cartoonist Ben Katchor was the first cartoonist to win a grant in 2000.

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Fun Home is a memoir told in the form of a graphic novel, a collage of comic artist Alison Bechdel's impressions of her life — from her childhood spent growing up in a funeral home to her college years discovering women and burying her closeted father. Bechdel layers her methodical drawings with precise, searching prose, [...]

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In an age when everyone and their niece has written a tell-all book, when even fictional characters like Ron Burgundy are penning the stories of their lives, how does a memoir stand out among its peers? What qualities make it like nothing we've seen before? Sometimes truly extraordinary experiences can launch a memoir into uncharted [...]

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Fun Home, in concert with Craig Thompson's Blankets, was one of the works that proved to my doubting eyes that graphic novels could reach heights every bit as poetic, moving, and magical as the finest prose. Darkly funny but wholly sincere, the story of a young woman coming to terms both with herself and her [...]

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The finalists for the 33rd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been revealed, and we’ve collected free samples of all their books below–some of the best books released in 2012. Here’s more about the awards:

“The winners of the L.A. Times book prizes will be announced at an awards ceremony April 19, the evening before the L.A. Times Festival of Books, April 20-21. Held on USC’s campus in Bovard Auditorium, the awards are open to the public; tickets will be made available in late March.”

 

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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This morning, at last, I read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir. 

Two words:

By the complexity and vulnerability of this story.  By Bechdel's literate and fascinating mind.  By the structure of this book.  By the many shadings within the illustrations.  How in the world did Bechdel make this book, I wondered.  I am, no doubt, the last to wonder.

Fortunately, she's out there on YouTube, answering the question. 

Perhaps because I am married to a man whose drawings I love, but whose cautions are endless—I am not an illustrator, he will say, repeatedly that dark look he gets in his eyes—I am fascinated by Bechdel's description of the work that she does—layer by layer by layer by layer.  Hundreds of images are required to tell her story.  Look at how she approaches a single one. 

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The author of "Fun Home" and "Are You My Mother?" on the difficulties of illustrating psychoanalysis and more.

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So far, 224 writers have signed a new Writers in Support of the Occupy Movement petition. What do you think?

The petition is composed of a single sentence: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” So far, the petition has virtual signatures from Alison Bechdel, Samuel R. Delaney, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie and many other authors. You can sign at the bottom of the page.

Earlier today, Occupy Wall Street activists braced for a possible eviction, but the city decided to postpone the scheduled cleaning. (Via Sarah Weinman & Bookforum)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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First off, if you want to waste some time by seeing what happens when LOLcats take on Presidential Politics, check out Ron Paul Can Has Cheezburger? After all, the American Dream is for every person to have a bukkit of their own...

Anyway, it's the last day of 2007, so let's talk about all the books that I read in 2006 and haven't talked about yet. La la la la la la la la.

First off, a book I really, really loved.

CHERUB: The Recruit Robert Muchamore

James can't catch a break. His mother is awful (and a major dealer in stolen goods) his sister's father isn't any better. Then he gets suspended for fighting in school and his mom dies.

Enter CHERUB. Founded over 50 years ago, CHERUB is a division of MI5--British Intelligence. No one ever suspects a kid, so that's who they send--kids.

James will be a spy and receive a top-notch education, but only if he can survive the training period.

And then, if he does, the real work begins.

A fun and gripping adventure story, I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the books in this series...

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now Lynn Peril

This is a well-done, not overly academic look at the history of women's high education. It's a pretty balanced account with a lot of pull-out boxes about various aspects of female college life and lots of "Femorbilia" looking at different items marketed to the college girl. I especially enjoyed the "College Girls Book Shelf"-- a running thread of literary treatments of college girls throughout history.

I Am the Messenger Markus Zusak

I liked this book.

Ed is a slacker cab driver with no future. After foiling a bank robbery, he starts to recieve playing cards with messages on them.

With nothing to lose, he starts following them, discovering problems to be solved, some are easy and heartwarming, such as a church with no congregation and some are dangerous and chilling, like a woman being raped every night by her drunk husband.

Through solving these problems, he starts to find direction in life.

Zusak is an awesome writer. It's about as different from The Book Thief as can be, but that just shows his range.

White Is for Magic Laurie Faria Stolarz

A fun guilty-pleasure type read.

Stacey has nightmares about people being murdered--nightmares that have an awful habit of coming true. It's been a year since she saved her best friend last year (in the first of the series, Blue Is For Nightmares. Now the target of her nightmares is... herself. Luckily, she's a witch with an arsenal of spells to help her find the strength and courage she needs.

I couldn't put it down, but I also have no desire to read the rest of the series. The spells felt really, really hokey.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel

This is a graphic novel memoir of small town America, literature, coming out, and family secrets.

It was really, really good, but the amount of literary allusion and quotations got old after awhile--that aspect was a bit overdone.

Mermaid Park Beth Mayall

Amy hates her family--her jerkwad of a step father, her perfect sister... so she is very much not looking forward to a long weekend on the Jersey shore at her mother's godmother's motel.

But, she finds a boy, and a waterpark of mermaids. (A forbidden waterpark of mermaids.) She talks her mother into letting her stay for the summer, and talks her way into a job at Mermaid Park, unraveling a few family secrets along the way.

A perfectly lovely book, although it didn't stay with me for long.

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Today the guys over at Mugglenet.Com were in town giving a readng of their book (which I review below), but I couldn't go. I had to work. But, that's ok, see, I promised you big excitement and here it is:

Check out how I spent my afternoon:

That's my coworker and friend Becci on the left, me on the right. But, I have to say, that's a day of Harry Potter cruelty when you have to decide between the Knight Bus and a Mugglenet reading. It's a hard life I lead, I know.

Here's what the thing looks like on the outside:




This is the "front" side, which has the door and stuff.







This is the "back" side.






Here's the Harry Potter bookshelf, which is to the right when you walk in. Across the way from the bookshelf, is a big blowup of the Deathly Hallows cover art under glass.




Then, looking from the bookshelf down the bus, this is it.





Of course, in the gear up to the end of the series, there is lots of speculation about how it will end and how the big questions will be answered. Is Dumbledore really dead? Will Harry get his head out of the #$@ and take Ginny back? Will Ron and Hermione ever get their act together and snog already? Where are the the other horcruxes? Who is RAB? And, of course, the big one, just whose side is Severus Snape on?!

These books attempt to answer the questions...

Mugglenet.Com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End by Ben Schoen, Emerson Spartz, Andy Gordon, Gretchen Stull, and Jamie Lawrence

This is an excellent book written by some hard-core Potter fans. So, out of the two questions they give their predictions on that have already passed (when will the book come out and what will it be called) they were totally wrong, BUT! their evidence is solid and their arguements well thought out.

Such questions they debate are is Dumbledore really dead? Is Harry a Horcrux? What is Neville's Destiny? and the role of prophesies. The great thing about this book is that even though the authors clearly state a side in the debate, they do offer both sides of the arguement. The authors think that Dumbledore is really dead (which I agree with) but they also make the most convincing arguement I've ever seen that Dumbledore lives.

I don't agree with all of their predictions and I think they ignore some crucial evidence. I really respect the book for sticking to a very strict set of sources-- the books, and interviews with J. K. Rowling. Also, they never present their conclusions as given fact, they are always very explicit about what their opinions are and what we know for sure.

Sadly, that is not the case with The Great Snape Debate by Amy Berner, Orson Scott Card, and Joyce Millman. (This is only available at Border's stores until after Deathly Hallows comes out.)

The concept of the book is great. One side of the book is the case for Snape's innocence--flip it over and it's the case for Snape's guilt.

Be warned, despite what the cover says, Orson Scott Card is NOT an author this book-- he has a 30 page essage on Snape, but the rest of the book is by Berner and Millman.

They make a lot of assumptions without any textual evidence--I can understand why people would assume that Lucius Malfoy took a young Severus Snape under his wing at school, but there is nothing in the "cannon" about this, yet the author's take it as fact and base their arguements on it. They say that Dumbledore isn't entirely trustworthy because he's made bad decisions in the past, such as letting Tom Riddle attend Hogwarts-- completely misisng the fact that Dumbledore wasn't headmaster at the time, so it really wasn't his decision.

In addition to faulty assumptions for which we have no evidence, they also use such things as the movies as evidence for what might happen in Book 7. Despite the fact that J. K. Rowling approved the movie scripts doesn't mean they can be taken as evidence because it's not like she wrote the scripts. Plus, they use the film career of Alan Rickman as evidence. I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with anything.

There are lots of sidebars that are supposed to be humorous-- like what's on Snape's iPod, or the fact that Snape's secret vice is really Dancing With the Stars. Where I appreciated the inclusion of The Best of the Smiths, Vol. 1 on Snape's iPod, the rest of it was just lame.

I bought the book because Orson Scott Card's name was on it. His essay is really good, but the rest of the book is just a crappy thing quickly churned out to make a fast buck.

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