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The Secret to Superhuman Strengthis now available (HMH Books).
She felt dare she say it?
I was very trained to be completely stuck in my head, she says from her studio in Vermont.
Queerness brought me into my body; therapy brought me into my feelings.
With this book, Ive tried to come back out into the world.
Do you own a Peloton?
[Laughs] I do not.
I draw the line there.
I understand the appeal of them, but thats a lot of money.
Id rather go out on my actual bike.
Its this blissful, conflict-free part of my life where I am doing something fun.
Its too hard to think about your shit when youre lifting something heavy.Yeah, it is.
Youre substituting one kind of pure difficulty for another.
Have you been able to access that?To get in that state creatively is very elusive.
With athletic things, those are hacks for me to get to that place.
And if I can get there in one way, maybe it will help me stick there creatively.
The book is really about this thing that exercise enables me to get to.
But that, too, got really wearing.
Its hard to always be in a defensive mode.
And over the years, my feelings about physical strength have changed.
It went from this childhood adulation of brute power to understanding that thats the opposite of real inner strength.
Its more about connection and openness, not about keeping everyone at bay.
You also mention admiring the bodybuilder Charles Atlas as a kid and wanting to emulate his muscularity.
Did you ever have an aesthetic desire with regard to exercise?Yeah.
To be a little girl admiring these muscular men in the comic books was a bit unusual.
I never did bodybuilding, but I enjoyed building my modest muscles.
At the same time, I was part of this feminist community that looked a bit askance at exercise.
I was hiding that there was some aesthetic consideration to what I did.
It was also a queer thing.
I wanted a more masculine physique.
I didnt want to be soft looking.
Obviously, exercise and aesthetics have a particular valence among gay men.
That is just a part of myself that feels what am I trying to say?
Having a womans body but having this aesthetic preference for male bodies.
Its very disconnected from my sexuality.
Im not erotically attracted to mens bodies, but visually I am.
Is that something you see as a gender identification?I guess so, yeah.
Ive never done super-deep thinking about it.
It just feels like a slight dissonance thats part of who I am.
Fun HomeandAre You My Mother?are both narratives about your parents in which youre very much a character.
WithAre You My Mother?I attempted a more literal, photographic drawing that wasnt very funny.
I rarely hear new questions, and I cant make up new answers.
Sometimes Im tempted to, but interviews perpetuate themselves.
In general, I venture to give interviewers what they want.
Sometimes its really unpleasant.
People will push until you tell them something juicy.
And I cant stop myself.
I get anxious when someone else has a say in the narrative.
Its a very similar ending toFun Home.Its the same story.
My father taught me to be an artist.
My mother taught me to be a writer.
LikeThe Secret to Superhuman Strength, it comes up to the present moment finishing the book.
I dont know why I have to do that.
Its cheating or something.
Its a way of avoiding a real ending.
I talk in this new book about how ending the book is like ending your life.
But thats what you have to embrace.
I greatly reduced my drinking.
I know it will come and go.
Im not permanently in this blissed-out state.
But I was for a while.
I feel like I will have a very similar process when I die.
Not wanting to leave but, I guess, wanting to see what happens in that moment of dying.
Theres only one way to know.Isnt it crazy were all going to die?
It was always spontaneous.
Fun HomeandAre You My Mother?both had very specific color palettes.
I wasnt sure how I was going to do it.
I had to rely on her own aesthetic instinct much more than I thought I would.
I was living out this theme of the book: I wasnt a self-sufficient artist.
I literally needed her help.
She wasnt sitting there with pretty watercolors making blue skies.
Fun Homeis shaded with a distinctive algae blue.
Why did you choose that color?I didnt want there to be color inFun Home.
Part of my whole ambivalence about color is my fathers fault.
He was this interior-design fanatic who loved color.
He would get into fights with people over whether something was fuchsia or magenta.
Like,Fine, Dad, you do the color.
I picked a gray-green color that I thought looked sad and elegiac.
I wondered if you ever spoke to Roy, your old babysitter?No.
Part of me is always expecting I might hear from him.
Ive tried to Google him.
He has a very common name, theres no way to trace him.
I think hes just this straight guy living a normal life somewhere.
I dont think he was really gay.
Thats my sense of him.
At the time, yes, I knew this was not a great thing.
Im revealing this very problematic behavior on my fathers part.
I dont think my father was a predator.
Thats a pretty big caveat.It is.
But I wanted to honor my fathers experience.
He told this double story depending on what kind of reaction he wanted to get.
He told my mother he had been molested by a farmhand when he was 14.
He told me hed had a very pleasurable experience with that guy.
I think that was probably true.
Maybe they were, maybe they werent.
I tried to stay out of it and just show what happened.
Its hard to apply our modern standards to what people were doing then.
So many of my friends were having these crazy affairs with middle-aged men.
Nobody blinked an eye.
It was a different culture.
Im not saying it was okay.
The whole ethos was different.
But you cant go back and apply our current morals to what was happening then.
Im not excusing it.
I just dont want to revise the history of it.
Did you experience a moment of catharsis in the process of finishingFun Home?Yeah.
I was hoping that same thing would happen by writing about my mother.
It was not quite the same experience, but something got worked out.
I dont think youre ever done with it.
Did the literary success ofFun Homethrow you off in terms of creating the next book?Oh, totally.
I wasnt very ambitious in my youth.
I was happy being this marginal subcultural figure.
I started to nurse a grudge that I was just going to miss the boat.
That period corresponded with me starting to have more financial trouble.
The whole gay scene was disintegrating by the early 2000s.
It started to get harder for me to earn a living from my comic strip.
The internet was replacing newspapers; gay and womens bookstores were closing.
My publisher had gone bankrupt.
I was on this iceberg that was starting to melt.
They were saying, People dont need this work the way they once did.
That was what my agent was hearing even from lesbian editors at publishing houses.
I really had to think about what I was doing.
I made this vow to myself: These characters are relevant, these stories are relevant.
I was writingFun Homewithout any idea that it was going to go anywhere.
Then it did, and it saved me.
But then I was in this whole different relation to the world.
It just changed how hard it was to do it.
I had a lot of just self doubt.
A sense of impostor syndrome?Very much.
Thats my go-to fear.
You must be getting close to something real because my mind is going blank.
Thats what happens in therapy when youre trying to avoid something.
That book was so successful.
What on earth are you going to do next?
I was just like, Fuck me.
That, incidentally,will also now be a movie.I know, I know.
I didnt really know enough about it to be making an informed decision.
I decided what my soul would be worth.
I named a higher number, which they didnt want to pay.
They didnt want to pay that.
Thats very practical.Yeah, I was relieved I didnt have to think about that.
The musical didnt feel threatening in the same way.
It never occurred to me it could turn out to be a really bad musical.
I didnt realize a musical could be bad and go on forever and ever.
That would have been awful.
So glad that didnt happen.
It feels like a somewhat different entity.
The movie is going to be a movie of the musical.
Its going to have the songs.
I would feel differently if it were an adaptation of the book.
Adapting it into a TV show seems like a no-brainer.
Was that ever an option?Honestly Im working on that right now.
I dont want to talk about the specifics, because if it falls through, its just a bummer.
But its a plan to create an animated series based on my drawings.
The original concept for the show was to update it and set it in the present.
Itll be looking at how that played out.
It was in the middle of AIDS.
The degree of casual homophobia of those days is also really incomprehensible to young people now.
I think that would be interesting to show.
What was your relationship to the protagonist, Mo?
She was a fan of mine.
Like I answered a fan letter and got into a relationship with this woman.
One of our first fights was because I was ranting over something in the news.
And she said, God, youre just like your cartoon character.
I said, I know.
She thought it was a joke, but no, I was pretty serious about it.
I do poke fun at Mo, but I have a lot of those same anxieties and concerns.
Do you see her as a heightened version of a neurotic self?Yes.
And that was a bit cathartic to go a little further than I would actually go.
It was just a nod to my identification with her.
So it wasnt a joke.
As in, like, spinning the term for homosexual.Oh no, I never thought of that.
Thats a good one.
Im going to tell everyone that was my plan all along.
Where do you land on that?I really feel like its both.
Theres a paradox to it, and I live with the tension of it.
That mechanism happens to all different kinds of people.
I was just reading apieceby Ross Douthat.
But hes talking about how progressivism as an idea is getting assimilated.
People are using these little keywords and phrases to look good.
And thats how assimilation works.
You leave the powerful stuff aside and take the surface stuff.
Stuff is always going two steps forward, one step back.
But that demonstrates the futility of thinking about political progress as representational.
My career has moved from one to the other.
I was completely on the margins and happy to be so as a young cartoonist.
It was very rooted in its own difference.
It wasnt trying to appeal to anyone else.
I hoped that would happen, but I wasnt going to do anything to accommodate.
Just seemed like a bummer.
I never did a whole lot about AIDS, which I feel bad about.
Its a pretty tangential topic in the strip.
I never identified as a separatist, but I was kind of in that world.
I didnt have a lot of male friends.
What if they died?It was so scary.
I was avoiding it, honestly.
I feel regret that I didnt wade in there more.
How did you feel about the decision to stopDykes?It was difficult and painful.
My plan was to take a break for a year, but then I didnt go back.
I couldnt bear to end it, Alex.
It just wasnt reflecting my life in the same way.
I had these characters living in a group household way beyond the age anyone would do that.
What is your read on where we are now culturally?I dont really know.
All my mechanisms for gauging whats going on have been completely broken.
I feel confused and I dont understand how reality works anymore.
What are the mechanisms you usually use?Questions like, Whos got the power?
Who has the money?
You could figure out a dynamic who was profiting, who was being oppressed.
I feel like people have just really lost their minds.
Do you feel like the broken compass is connected with your own success?Maybe.
And that I depend on them in some way, which I never did before.
So it does make me complicit in ways I dont even know.
Part of feeling like my mechanisms are broken is that Im very worried about the planet.
I feel not at all convinced that were going to survive climate change.
I have lost the ability to see very far into the future.
I think you have to constantly fight against what you lose.
The comfort of making more money makes you lose touch with so much thats going on in the world.
I have to fight being subsumed into the system, and I dont always do that.
Sometimes I just wanna check out and watch TV.
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