Bookslut's "obligatory interview" with Alison Bechdel

QUESTION: In Fun Home, and a little bit in Dykes, you take on a very literary tone with Joycean and Homeric references. Do you see the graphic novel heading towards a literature classification?

ANSWER: Yeah, I think it’s happening now. Like the whole Time Magazine thing with my book. They called it the book of the year, not just the graphic book of the year, but the book of the year. It’s kind of startling. It makes me very happy for the graphic novel format just in the same way that I’m always happy that I get perceived as just a “cartoonist,” and not a “lesbian cartoonist” like in the old days. That’s how I would get boxed up.

It’s a similar kind of thing at work, and I think because my book is so ostentatiously literary, that it’s about literature, it got a lot of literary attention. That wasn’t my secret plan, but I think that’s part of why it got more literary scrutiny. Other graphic novels have gotten that attention too, but it just sort of reached a crescendo with my book.