Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture featuring Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist whose darkly humorous graphic memoirs, astute writing, and evocative drawing have forged an unlikely intimacy with a wide and disparate range of readers.

For twenty-five years Alison wrote and self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For, an award-winning generational chronicle called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” by Ms. Magazine. From the strip was born the famous “Bechdel Test,” which measures gender bias in film. Her first graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was named Best Book of the year by TIME, which described the tightly architected investigation into Bechdel’s closeted bisexual father’s suicide “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and was adapted into a Broadway musical that has won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.” Bechdel is also the author of Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, which delves into her relationship with her mother, as well as the theories of twentieth-century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her latest work, a graphic memoir titled The Secret to Superhuman Strength, was released in 2021. Bechdel received a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2014 a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” In their citation the MacArthur Foundation said that Bechdel “is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.”

Sponsored by the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Fund.

To view a live-stream of Alison Bechdel's talk, please visit the Bowdoin Talks website.