Of course, loving what Kron and Tesori had done didn’t make the prospect of the musical being staged any less fraught. They operate differently, but with the same power.”Īn excerpt from Bechdel’s long-running series, Dykes to Watch Out For. I wonder if it is because of the way two registers collide. I felt seen.” As something of a connoisseur of therapy, she wonders if someone shouldn’t develop a whole new branch of lyric-based treatment: “I think there should be a kind of therapy where people hire playwrights and composers to make musical theatre of their sad childhoods.” Do comics and musicals have something in common? It strikes me they can share a weirdly direct route to the human heart. That first moment of hearing it: I just felt it was this great gift. (In the interim, she had been awarded a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and had published a second memoir, Are You My Mother?) “After a while – it had been years at this point – they sent me a script and a soundtrack. So much time passed between her agreeing to the idea and it becoming a reality she’d almost forgotten they were working on it at all. They made something beautiful out of it.” My mother had to live with strangers knowing intimate stuff about her life. “It never occurred to me that it could be very bad and very successful. I thought: if it’s a bad musical, it will just disappear.” She pauses. I had turned down a movie on the grounds that if it wasn’t good – and the chances of that being the case were very high, because most movies aren’t good – it would be awful to have it out there in the world, this terrible version of my most intimate history. “I only agreed to the idea of it at all because I didn’t know what I was getting into. “I could never have foreseen it,” she says of the musical, which opened on Broadway in 2015 and went on to win five Tony awards (it will be staged at the Young Vic in June). Last month, she even had a cameo in an episode of The Simpsons (in “Springfield Splendor”, Lisa Simpson writes a graphic memoir about her childhood called Sad Girl, which Marge illustrates when the book is a hit, Bechdel, Roz Chast and Marjane Satrapi appear alongside them on a panel at a comics’ convention). But with the book’s acclaimed publication, its appearance on the New York Times bestseller list and then the musical, all that changed. Before Fun Home, she had worked in relative obscurity fame, let alone fortune, seemed unlikely ever to be on the cards. Still, the feeling persists that, just lately, she is living a life that is not quite her own. Hasn’t she evolved too, down the years? “Yes! Fun Home is a midlife document for me and I am trying to move on.” She laughs. Why she should find this surprising is slightly mysterious.
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