May 22, 2025 • 44 mins
THE MOMENT WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!!! Very special guest ALISON BECHDEL — ever heard of her??? — joins us to talk about her new comic novel '`Spent,' the Bechdel Test, and more!
Check out Alison's website at https://dykestowatchoutfor.com | see her book tour dates at https://dykestowatchoutfor.com/blog | buy her book 'Spent' at https://bookshop.org/p/books/spent-a-comic-novel-alison-bechdel/21754189?ean=9780063278929&next=t&affiliate=397
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
The questions asked if movies have.
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands,
or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zeph and
best start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the Bechdel Cast. It's not April Fools. Maybe
you looked at the title of this episode and thought, no, there's.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
No way that's real. But well, guess what.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Look at the month. It's not April, it's real.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
It's May. And when we were joking on the April
Fool's episode on Snakes on a Plane where we were like,
it's been all leading up to this, that actually applies
to today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It's kind of true. I mean, I cannot believe that
this happened. We recorded this interview yesterday and I can't
believe it. If this is your first episode of the
Bechdel Cast and you're coming here because of our guest,
my name's Jamie.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Loft It, my name is Caitlin Durante.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And this is our podcast where we talk about in
a normal episode. This is a very special episode. It
is just an interview, and not just an interview. It
is the interview, but we're not talking about a movie.
We're talking about living, laughing, loving with you know, she
who shall be named in just a moment. Every week
for almost nine years now, we have talked about your
(01:24):
favorite movies using an intersectional feminist lens, using the and
here's where it gets interesting Bechdel test as a jumping off,
like for a discussion. And normally we would tell you
and the Bechdel test is this thing, and we tell
and someone invented it, and she's our guest today we've
(01:45):
been using her name. I truly have been I've like,
not quite lostly, but I've for years wondered, is she
mad at us? My favorite looping thought to have this
person I've never met who doesn't know I exist, are
they at him? And we can answer definitively, it does.
It doesn't seem it doesn't seem like it. It doesn't
(02:05):
seem like we can't be sure. Maybe she was just
being nice, but it doesn't seem like it. We're so
thrilled to have Alison Bechdel on the show today. We
are talking about a couple of things. We're talking obviously
about the Bechdel Test, but we are also talking about
her new book Spent, which we've both gotten a chance
to read. It will be out right around the time
(02:26):
you're hearing this episode, and it's terrific. So yeah, I
guess what I wanted to say before we start is that,
you know, if you're listening to this, I'm assuming you're
familiar with the Bechdel Test, but if you're not familiar
with the work of Alison Bechdel, that really is where
the good shit is. And the more that we like
(02:49):
revisit her work because, as we've discussed, the Bechdel Test
was a one off joke she made in the eighties
that has become a serious media metric. But so much
of what we actually talk about on this show, intersectional
feminist issues and just trying to survive in a capitalist hellscape.
That is literally what she's been writing about for forty
(03:10):
years in a very funny, thoughtful way. And so you know,
we'll have all the links in the description to her work,
but you know, let this be a reminder if you
haven't picked up in Alison Bechdel book, You simply must,
You simply must.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
You simply must. And also she is touring with her
I think the tour has already kicked off by the
time you are hearing this episode, but she's on a
book tour in possibly a city near you, and so
check out her website her Instagram for tour dates and
(03:47):
be sure to go out and support Are now best
friend Alison Bechtel URBFF and I think, without much further ado,
here's our interview with our best friend, Alison Bechdel Enjoycast.
I'm going to say the very cliche thing that our
(04:09):
guest today needs no introduction, but it's true, and we're
going to introduce her anyway. She is an author and cartoonist.
Her works include Dikes to Watch Out For, Are You
My Mother? Fun Home, and her new comic novel Spent,
which everyone should buy right now. And our podcast is
(04:31):
named after her. It's Alison Bechdel, Hello and well welcome.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Hi Caitlin, Hi Jamie. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Oh We're so happy to have you. It's a dream
come true.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Thank you for naming your podcast after the Bechdel Test.
That's crazy.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Thank you for we were talking about this off Mike. Thank
you for not being mad at us about it. This
is like, this is so surreal. We're so excited to
have you.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I was just listening to some episodes. I I listened
to the Groundhog Day episode because that's one of my
favorite movies. Though of course it doesn't pass.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
The test, and that's one of our very old episodes,
which we are I'm sure humiliated by in the year
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
But well, Caitlin, I learned that you are also a
Pennsylvanian like me.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Yes, yes, I'm originally from rural western Pennsylvania and now
my family lives around the State College area.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
So yeah, you were just in State College? I was, yeah, yeah,
and you went to penn State.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I did. I been doing a little research for my
first degree, which I would never mention, but but yeah,
so we have Pennsylvania roots.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Did you have fun in State College on this recent visit.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
I did. I did a comedy show there at a
theater called the Blue Brick Theater. Everyone checked that out
if you're ever in the State College area. But yeah,
I did a stand up show and it was a
lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Yeah. But anyway, again, thank you so much for being here.
We want to start by just chatting a bit about
your new book, Book Spent, So just to start us off,
tell us a little bit about it, give us an overview,
and we'll go from there.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Spent is a subtitle is a comic novel, because of
course it's told in comics, and it's also hopefully funny.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
It can confirm.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It's a kind of funny mashup of my memoirs that
I've written about me and my life and my comic
strip Likes to Watch out for from back in the
olden days in the eighties and nineties and early aughts,
where I wrote about a whole little community of friends.
In this new book, this new book, Spent, it's funny.
(06:44):
It was. My plan was that it was just going
to be another memoir. It was going to be like
fun Home or Are You My Mother? This book where
I looked at my own life, in this case, looked
at my own life, my financial life, and my relationship
to money and privilege and living in capitalism and everything.
But when I sat down to start working on that,
I just felt like I wanted to go to sleep.
(07:05):
It was just like, oh my God, I can't do that.
And then I got this almost immediately. I had this
great idea, Well, what if I'm writing about a cartoonist
named Alison Bechtel who's trying to write a memoir about
money and just constantly getting distracted by other things. And
so that's what I ended up doing, and it was
much more fun. And one of the directions that it
(07:27):
went off in was my friends in this new book,
my friends who lived down the hill for me in
Vermont are actually some of the old Dikes to watch
out for characters Oh cool, Lois and Ginger and Sparrow
who used to live together in this group house one
hundred years ago and they're still living there and they're
still now, but now they're in their sixties. And it
(07:50):
was really fun to rediscover those people and to start
writing about them again. And I just felt like, oh
my god, I missed you guys. So it's about It's
kind of about me and my real life with my
partner Holly, even though it's also filled with all kinds
of purely fictional scenarios like in the book, Holly and
(08:10):
I live on a pygmy goat sanctuary, which in real
life we do not do. But I just let myself
do whatever I wanted and it was so fun.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, So I kept as I was reading it, I
was like, Oh, this is like Alison Buchdel Avengers Endgame.
It's all of your world's like colliding in this super
cool way.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I don't know that reference, but yes, that's exactly what
I'm going for.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, because how long had it been since you had
worked with the Dykes to watch up for characters?
Speaker 1 (08:40):
A really long time. I wrote my last Dyke's episode
in two thousand and eight, so I can't do that
math anymore. A long time.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
Ago, almost twenty years, seventeen years something.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
It was so cool. Yeah, we're both big fans of
the original comics, so it was really cool kind of
catching up with the character.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
It was really nice. Definitely.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, we're in the process of writing this book. How
long did it take to write? And Yeah, A lot
of what you're talking about in the book has to
do with I mean, it takes place during the pandemic era,
I think mostly in twenty twenty two. How much were
you pulling from your feelings and anxieties of that time?
Speaker 1 (09:21):
A lot? I mean that was the saving grace of it, Like,
you know, everything is just so fucking crazy. Yeah, life
is insane, and it was an outlet for that, and
you know, like a constructive outlet to take all my
anxieties and fears and put them into these characters and
(09:42):
you know, keep them somewhat at arm's length, but also
just to process it all. So I was living through
the news. This is something I missed from the old
days with the comic strip, was it was a way
to respond and figure out what was happening in the
world as it unspooled, because the comic strip was not
just about the carearacter's lives but about the news. So
(10:03):
this was a way to kind of get back to
that modality to you know, keeping track of what like this,
the story was happening in real time. You know, certain
things happen in the news, the characters would respond to them,
and yeah, it happens like between twenty twenty two and
twenty twenty four. I finished it just before the election,
(10:24):
so I had to I didn't know what was going
to happen, so I had to sort of leave things
somewhat open. Oh God, I can't even think about it.
Are we all just having some kind of collective bad dream?
Could that be?
Speaker 4 (10:36):
I hope?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So that being the best case scenario is scary, I mean,
but there's so much of the anxiety is that you're
having that we talk about on the show all the
time now of like trying to make art and connect
with people during a time where it feels like you
have to sort of dissociate in order to even try
to do that, and it's impossible to do without ending
(10:59):
on I mean, like we work for iHeartRadio. That's probably
not good to all of these like you know, constant compromises.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Alison is definitely struggling with those kind of choices in
the book and those decisions, Like it starts with her
getting a very high offer to have her book published
by megalipub, this big evil empire publishing company that you know,
she accepts their offer, but then she's tortured by it.
(11:33):
Just the challenge of creating, of doing anything constructive and
creative in this atmosphere. That's also kind of what the
book is about. And Alison in the book is just
like can't concentrate on anything. She's so upset about the news.
She's flitting from one project to another, which is very
(11:53):
much like my actual creative process.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Same. Yeah, to the point where I never get anything done.
But I also love an aspect of the book is
commentary on the state of Hollywood, basically because they're not
to you know, I'm going to try to avoid spoilers,
but there's a part where the Alison character goes to
La and pitches a show and also visits the set
(12:22):
of a different show. And the way that the creator
of this show has adapted your work or your character's work,
and just the hollywoodification of it all. It's all. It's very,
very funny.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And the detail, one of my favorite details or jokes
in the book is Alison googling how expensive someone's stove is,
because I've definitely done that where I was like, I
don't like that person. Let me find out how much
there's stove costs. And the answer you never like to
hear it.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah, that's Allison is having a zoom session with the
showrunner of the television show that's based on a memoir
that Allison wrote in her youth. It's kind of it's
a way to play with my book fun Home that
got turned into a Broadway musical, and in this book,
Allison's has written a memoir about her father, the taxidermist,
(13:21):
death and Taxidermy. It gets turned into a Prestige TV
series and this woman.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Sadilla cast in the Fake Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
It's starring Benedette Cumberbatch and Sarah Paulson and Aubrey Plaza
as Alison. It's funny. I was talking to someone the
other day doing an interview and they were like, I
googled that show, but I couldn't find anything.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Thought it was real. I'm tue it would be. I mean,
I know that the Alison character is a little resentful
of different creative embellishments that are made, but might have
been a fun show.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
It does sound fun. Yeah, Sadilla is just kicking all
kinds of liberties with Alison's manuscript, and she has this
very fancy wolf stove with red knobs that Alison is
mesmerized by when they have their Zoom meetings.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
That was another I mean, that was another thing that
I don't know. It's just like we've been again, we've
been fans of your work for so long, and seeing
all of these themes and seeing you sort of interface
with work you've done in the past in this book,
especially with the adaptation, I'm so curious, Like, yeah, reflecting
on I mean, I guess we kind of want to
talk about this with the Bechdel Test as well, you know,
(14:34):
creating this tremendously successful work and fun home and then
having it adapted, and then having this version of yourself
in the world that is kind of outside of your control. Yeah,
I mean in your own life. How do you manage that?
Speaker 1 (14:49):
It's weird and crazy? And I managed it in this
case by like writing about it and playing with it
in this book form. It was really fun to get
to just sort of free associate about I don't know,
I feel very lucky that Phone Home turned out as well,
that the musical that was made from Phone Home was
(15:10):
so good, but it could have gone the other way,
and so this was kind of a way of exploring
that possibility.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, speaking of the Bechdel test,
I ever heard of it? We we always say in
the show, like at the beginning of every episode, like
we use this as a jumping off point, and you know,
it's it's to initiate larger conversations. But we're just we're
you know, we're curious about a lot of different things.
(15:37):
As far as I guess, like, when did you first
realize that the Bechdel test that people were using and
applying to media as a metric was becoming like a thing.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It was sometime in the early two thousands. I should
probably try and like, well, I have tried to write
about it somewhere, like on my blogger or something, my blog.
Oh my god, I just can't keep up.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Like substocks are basically blogs, They just go by a
vigilian substacks.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I mean, how many substacks do you guys subscribe to?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
You?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
How are you supposed to keep up with all these people?
Isn't that what newspapers were used to be for?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I feel that I have most of
my inboxes on red substacks.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yeah. I don't know what to do with them anyhow. Wait,
we're digressing. What were we? Oh? Oh the Bechdel Test.
Like yeah, it was like in the early two thousands.
I was like, what, that's crazy. Like I had written
this comic strip, the comic strip from which it got
adapted in nineteen eighty five, like a thousand years ago,
and I didn't really think much about it after that,
(16:48):
you know, I wrote this cartoon. It was the kind
of humor me and my lesbian feminist pals would bandy
about in those days, something that we never thought anyone
outside of that little sub culture would get and so
it was very surprising and gratifying to me to see
it entering this larger realm. I think it was feminist
(17:08):
film students who somehow stumbled on it and felt like
it expressed a useful concept and just started circulating it.
But at first I was a little like, I didn't
mean for it to be real. Way, this is my name?
What are you doing? Right? I mean I never objected
because it was always fine, but it was weird.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
I can only imagine.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And some people, you know, mostly people think I made
this declaration, which I never did.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, just how I kind
of forget how. Yeah, there's two full decades between the
strip and then it becoming this like very commonly cited
media test. That's really bizarre.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, I learned about something called Stigler's law of eponymy
oooh okay, same more, anything that has gotten named after
a person that's eponymous is never named after the actual
person who invented it, but someone sort of obliquely related
to it, like Murphy's Law was not really invented by Murphy,
(18:13):
and in fact, Stiegler's law of economy was not invented
by Stiegler but someone.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Adjacent.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, speaking of the name of the test every so often,
really it is technically called the Bechdel Wallace test. We
try every so often to remind people of the original
context of the town.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That's very good of you.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
We try our best, thank you, But we'd be curious
just to share with our listeners why it's called the
Bechdel Wallace test. And a little more about Liz Wallace.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I feel quite sheepish about this because I honestly have
not been in touch with Liz Wallace since nineteen eighty five.
She was someone in my karate class.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
What that's so cool?
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, I did karate and she was talking about this
one day as we were all changing our clothes, and
I just worked it into my comic stare. I mean
at the time I told her I was doing it,
and she knew that. But in this later iteration, now
that it's become a thing, I've I have had no
contact with her. I don't even know how to find her.
And how can you find someone with a name like that,
It's like very common.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Maybe she's still haunting the karate studio to this day.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Maybe she is.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
That's so cool. But like you said, Allison, I think
that people think that you set out to create this
test that would be used with like those intentions.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
In like a very academic way, which.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
People have done since then because they were inspired by
your test.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
If I had done that, it wouldn't have caught on.
That's the beauty of it.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Yeah, you know, it just has to happen organically. Yes,
But as Jamie was alluding to the origins of the
test that appear in Dykes to Watch Out For, the
implication in the scene is characters discussing basically having to
ship two women together in movies that they watch, because
(20:03):
representation of lesbians in mainstream movies was like virtually non
existent back then. But wait a.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Second, what is this word ship? I am like an
old person. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
That's what we're here for.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Shivving is Jamie, take it away?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Oh gosh, now I'm gonna whiff it. Shipping is basically
fan fiction in your head of like, oh, these I'm
just imagining these two characters together because mainstream movies are
so aggressively heteronormative that they would never put a queer
couple on screen. So I'm trying to think of, like,
what is a classic example, Caitlin of Oh, it happens
(20:41):
in TV all the time.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, what's it called shipping? Like what does that imply.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
That I wish I do? I'm not quite online enough
to know.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Me either, And I'm gonna take a guess and it
might be so wrong, but I wonder if ship comes
from like relationship and they're hoping that these two characters
enter a relationship that I don't know. Actually I maybe
made that up.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Let's go with that.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah, But all this to say, the test has queer
roots that are often erased in this sort of like
more mainstream application of the Bechdel Test. And curious about
your thoughts on that, and also we're curious about how
you feel representation of queer characters in media has evolved
(21:28):
since the test first appears in Dick's To Watch Out
For in the eighties, because there has been some progress
since then where people don't have to ship, you know,
two women together for example, because that does happen on
screen now. So yeah, that's on all that.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Right, Well, yeah, there's been a huge amount of progress.
I'll put that in quotes, because yeah, there's tons of
representation now, but not all of it is great, you
know for sure. And also I just at a certain point,
I just started feeling like, man, I missed the battle
(22:07):
days when like we were in the shadows and no
one knew what we were up to and like we
were just free, you know, it didn't have to be
representing or performing. I don't really want to go back
to that those days, although I don't really have much
say in it since that's whoever're all headed on a
grease pole. But yeah, things improved somewhat.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
Do you have any favorite movies in particular?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Well, here's the thing. I am not like a really
a movie person, so I get really embarrassed when people
ask me, like, what films passed the Bechdel Test? I
don't fucking know.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
And really do the math yourself. Yeah, that's our job.
That's literally our job.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
So yeah, no, I'm so glad you guys are on it.
And in fact, I always laugh because literally Groundhog Day
is one of my favorite movies of all time and
it totally doesn't pass the test. And I was just
listening to your episode on it.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, I mean so many of our favorite movies. That's
like sort of what, I don't know. It's interesting like
having guests on the show over the years and having
the discussion of like it's okay, like your favorite movie
is your favorite movie. We're not here to yell at
you about it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And also sometimes you just want to check out. I
don't want to watch something totally relevant to my life
when I'm trying to relax. That would just not be soothing.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
Yeah, I love escapist media.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, and we to continue the spiral of weirdness. We
call that taking off our Bechdel goggles, when we just
watch a movie and don't think about Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It was actually you know, that strip came out of
the weird cognitive dissonance that I started to experience as
a young woman when I was getting woke, when I
was suddenly realizing, oh my god, the world is like
this huge power play and this half is oppressing this half.
I realized that I couldn't just watch a movie and
(24:02):
enjoy it, that everything was like really racist and oppressive
and rape and you know, you couldn't just you couldn't
check out and watch a movie. So I understand why
you would want to take off your Bechdel goggles.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
I do it every time I go to the movies, and.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
You gotta watch Indiana Jones.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Somehow that's there. It must, Yeah, And then I put
them on when we record episodes of our podcast.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
So that another question we're curious about. Have you heard
we've over the years learned more about sort of other
media metrics inspired by the Bechdel Test. Have you encountered
any of these ye over the years?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, I mean I don't know if if they have
names and stuff, but I know there's ones like are
there two people of color in the movie? Do they
talk to each other about something besides racism or a
white person? But my favorite one is this new climate
one have you heard about that?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I don't think so.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Tell us.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
It's called the climate reality check, and a movie passes
if in a movie that's set in the present or
remotely around the present, climate change has to be acknowledged
and the main character has to be like cognizant of that,
which I think is awesome for sure. Hacks Hacks is
a great example of a show that passes that test
(25:21):
with flying colors, because they're constantly definitely talking about that awesome.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, it does feel like, there's like it has to
be escapist media to happen now and not feature climate
anxiety to some extent.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it's it's just you can't
not mention it or it's just really bad.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I mean, but you've been writing about it for literally decades.
I mean I was going back and reading some old stuff.
I was like, Okay, this is she's been on this.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Lesbians were on the cutting edge. We knew everything back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Always well, you're talking about about sort of how dicks
to watch out. There was a lot of things you
were writing and as you were, you know, getting woke
in your early twenties and throughout your twenties. Yeah, and now,
I mean there is a huge fan base for you
that are you know, queer people of the next generation
and what is it? What is it like sort of
(26:16):
I guess this is a big question. But having those
that role kind of reversed and watching new generation of
people awakened to these issues that you've been talking about
since eighties.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
I love that young people are still reading my work.
I think that's so cool and it doesn't always happen,
but of course it's for a tragic reason. Which is
that they're still dealing with the same shit my generation
was dealing with. But I hear from a lot of
young people that they find it heartening and helpful to
see these people, you know, trying to do what they're
(26:52):
trying to do. So I love that. I've recently learned
something funny, which is that I had this whole bunch
of unintended readers of my comic strip when I was
doing it, which was the children of lesbians. I hear
from so many young or not even so young adults
these days, like people in their thirties who say, you know,
(27:15):
and they're just totally straight, regular people who know my
work intimately because they read it as small children stealing
it from their mother's shelves.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
I love.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So that's really cool too, that I had no idea
those kids were doing that. You never know who's gonna
read your stuff.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Yeah, you truly never do. I love the characters and
spent Jr. And Badger who are I guess it would
be gen Z. Yeah they're gen Z and they come
to less track of all.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Those gens yeah blurs.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
But I love these kids. God, I love JR. And Badger. Jr.
Is the daughter or the child. They're non binary. Jr.
Is the daughter of my characters Sparrow and Stuart, and
back in the day they were just a little kid
like I think there were five when I last had
sight of them. So I had to imagine, how is
(28:11):
j are going to grow up? And what are they
doing now? And she's there at Oberlin, which is where
I went to college. They're they're in a non binary
asexual polycule with a bunch of people, and they are
especially close with Badger this other friend, and the two
(28:31):
of them drop out and come home and move into
Alison's yurt. And it's just my fantasy of wanting to
have children because I never had kids, and I'm always
envious of my friends with children, not really not so
envious that I'm they're going to wish I haven't done anything, Yeah,
but it would be like it. It'd be kind of
cool to have some like grown up kids hanging around.
(28:53):
So I got to play with that idea. And they
come live in the yurt and do their podcast.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yes, yes, that way we are, yeah, podcasting from I
guess what we're asking is can we move in?
Speaker 4 (29:06):
Can we move into your at your definitely real goat sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, well, I definitely don't have a yurt, so you
just got to like live in my office.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Right, that won't be disruptive at all. I am curious
about the character Sheila. I had a lot of fun
sort of because I had just recently reread Fun Home
and then as I as you know, you're sort of
eased into the some Israel some is not of spent,
(29:37):
I was like, wait, did I miss a sister? I
did not miss a sister. I had to check Wikipedia
and I felt at ease. But yeah, there's there's this
conservative sister character. Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Uh? Kind of an amalgamation of you know, I do
have some trump bites in my some consent circles of
my family, and it was a way to write about
that without pinning it on anyone in particular, since it's
about my imaginary sister. But that was very cathartic. You know,
she's trying to get my book banned. She joins this group,
(30:14):
like what's that group called? In real life, they're called
Moms for Liberty, but in my strip, I call them
Liberty Mothers. And she's very envious of Alison, and she's
also writing a counter memoir, because when Alison wrote her
memoir about growing up with their father, the taxidermist, she
(30:35):
totally left her sister out of it, thinking that, well,
you know, it's all just exploring all these different aspects
of the kind of work I've done. And yes, writing
a memoir is a very one sided kind of thing
to do. I thought when I was writing Phone Home
that I was telling like the truth of my family,
but I was just telling my version, And so Allison
(30:56):
is having to grapple with that, like Sheila had a
whole experience that Alice and knew nothing about when they
were young.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
I mean, that's the beauty of this book and your
work in general. There's there's there's so rich, there's such
rich texts. They explore so many things. There's so many
also just relatable and comfortingly familiar moments, Like there's a
scene where the Alison character and her partner go to
their friend's place and they like it's during the pandemic
(31:26):
and they test they do those like by next yeah, yeah,
COVID tests before anyone can enter. And I was just like, exactly,
I did that. Yeah, that was like the first time
I'd seen each other's stoops, right, and I was like,
I haven't seen that in all the you know, post
pandemic media that's come out. I was like, I haven't
actually really seen anyone do that or acknowledge the Well,
(31:50):
it's just that simple, very familiar thing. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
About drawing stuff. You know about comics, you can and
and must show things, show the details of things. And
I just find that also interesting. It was, how do
you do a COVID test? And I would, you know,
got the things out and unwrap stuff and took pictures
and like, it's important to document these things even though
we all don't want to think about it.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It's nice having it between covers. But but but it's
it is really cool. I love your memoir work. But
it is really it was like such a fun way
to like return to your work by saying you comment
on things basically as they're happening, like you used to
do in a weekly strip.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yeah, yeah, I miss that. It's just fun.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, it's incredible. The thing that I really appreciate about
Spent that I also loved about Digs to Watch out
For is like Kaitlyn was just saying, the details of
the world are so specific to when you're writing it,
and the fact that you know a media trend that
(32:59):
we talk about a lot that I think comes from
a good place. But it's like, you know, this is
the book that will solve late capitalism or there are
these you know, broad solutions, and it's like, if everyone
did everything right, then this wouldn't have happened to us.
And what I love about your work is you don't
shy away from any of the problems that are plaguing
(33:21):
everybody to different degrees. But you also are like and
it's very stressful to be a person, and you know
you're not always going to be totally successful and you're
not going to be a perfect anti capitalist every day
because it's hard.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Well, one thing I feel very grateful to young people
for teaching me is that it's not on us. My god.
You know, Okay, Mike generation grew up thinking, Okay, if
I stop eating meat, my one tiny gesture is going
to change the world. And yes, that's good and useful
to do, but it got turned against us, you know,
the fossil fuel industry, the meat industry, they would love
(33:59):
for us all to be torn up with guilt and
anxiety about our personal behavior and that's just ridiculous. They're
the bad guys, not us.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, absolutely, I god, I'm I could go on an
infinity tangent, but I was just reading about how like
mobile gas created the idea of carbon footprints to make
people feel bad and adjust them to the planet's dying.
I'm like, you're sick. Oh yeah, because there are, I mean,
and you're you're the world of your books are populated
(34:30):
with them, like people who want to do right by
the people around them, but feeling so futile in those
individual gestures.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I just love those people. I love how earnest and
good they are, you know, And I want to I
want to. I feel like leftists, progressives in general get
such a fucking bad rap, Like what what is everyone
so exercised about? All we want to do is make
the world a better place? What is the problem? And
so I just wanted to try and really show them
(35:01):
some love.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
You nailed it, thank you, and.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Then sort of to start wrapping stuff up. I mean,
you've in the last ten years your work has been
adapted in all of these different ways. I know that
there was a podcast, there's obviously the musical, and the
book is to some extent about your character navigating TV.
Are there other mediums that you're interested in working in?
Are there like stories you've had on the back burner
(35:28):
that you want to come back to. What are you
excited about right now?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
I guess well, I'm perpetually trying to get an animated
version of Dikes to watch out for happening. But this
hasn't happened yet. But I'm really excited right now. I'm
in the middle of making the audiobook Have Spent Yeah,
which is such a funny project. Like it's all visual
humor and jokes. How do you translate that to something
(35:54):
where people can't see anything, it's just all sound. So
that's been a really fun project, like thinking up sound
effects to tell the story sound. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Yeah. And I mean, speaking of those visual jokes, they're
one of my favorites. Was they're gearing up for they're
like anti colonial, anti Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah. I was like, oh, yeah, we did that.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
We do that. And they're not sure how many toe
Ferky's to get, and so they get one to Furky
and that's on the like cashier conveyor belt, and then
they get another one that's faux Turkey. So it's toe fergyho.
I'm like, genius, perfect, amazing.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Oh good, thank you for noticing.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
But there's so many of those similar jokes that populate
the book, and it's awesome. Yeah, is there any anything
else you want to talk about? Tell us share?
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I don't know. I always go blank when people ask
me that question because I I don't know why, but
I just do. It's like, at this point it's a
Pavlovian response. My mind was completely blank. But feel free
to ask me anything, Ask me anything, anything you've been
wanting to know.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Oh my gosh. I'm like, I feel like when we
found out we were going to talk to you, we
had a million questions and then we were going through
them and they were like, this is stupid.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
No, what's the stupidest one? Ask me the stupidest one?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Oh man, that's Caitlyn.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
What do you what do you think? I don't know
if this is stupid necessarily, but what I am, let's
say curious about is and we've already kind of touched
on this, but maybe to sum it all up, like
I really want to know about your feelings about like
the legacy of the Bechdel Test, especially just considering that
(37:44):
it wasn't originally conceived to be used the way it's
used now, and how there are often, I would say,
kind of misinterpretations of the test where people will say
this movie passes the Bechdel Test for it's a feminist masterpiece,
or sort of the opposite of that, of like, this
(38:04):
movie doesn't pass, and that means it's misogynist trash, you
know that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm
just curious about your thoughts on its function in culture
and its overall legacy.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Well, yeah, I got over my ambivalence about it because
I feel like it's a great thing to have be
my legacy. It sums up in a way what my
work is all about, which is whose stories count, whose
subjectivity matters? And this I feel like our real fundamental
issue as humans is our inability to see outside of
(38:43):
our own little, diminished, puny self and to understand that
other people have their own agency and motivations and drives,
and we don't. Even even in our intimate relationships, we
want to like neutralize that other person so that they're
not in pinging on us. We have to learn to
live with others, to see other people, to actually have
(39:07):
mutual recognition with other people, and to me, that's kind
of what the test is about.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, And what I love about it is, Yeah,
for those kinds of conversations that we've had over the
years where it's like it's a jumping off point and
your work is uniquely like sending people to your work.
You're talking about all of that and have been and
it's just Yeah, it's it's like such an honor to
(39:32):
be able to talk to you well.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Back at Yeah, and thank you so much for doing
this whole project. I love that you're doing it.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
Yeah, eight years strong.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
It's longer than any relationship I've ever had. We're podcast
common law.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Married, love you Jamie.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Let me where are you in the same city where.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
We're both based in La Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, oh cool.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
So if you ever come out to pitch a ta
as your character does and spend look us.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Up, that would be awesome.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
I will do that and we'll speaking of cities and
going places. You are about to do a book tour, Yes,
I am tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Am I coming to La? I gotta look at my thing?
Speaker 2 (40:18):
No, I checked, we checked if you're going to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yes, I am going to San Francisco and Santa Cruz
and a bunch of other places. So check my check
my website and you can find them all. My my blog, sorry,
my blog.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
And we'll speaking of that. Where can people find your blog?
What's oh?
Speaker 1 (40:38):
My blog? You guys. I'm like, so, I can't get
into this social media groove. I have I stopped doing
it now. I'm all rusty and I just hate it.
I just hate Facebook, I hate Twitter. But I have
to do it to get the word out about this book.
If you go to Alisonbechdel dot com, that's easy enough,
(40:59):
and then and hit the blog tab and then you'll
be in the in the Bloggi sphere. I love it,
and you'll see my latest posts.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah that was not to keep going back to the book,
but I also loved the like for promoting a book
or promoting whatever else. They're like, Okay, you actually need
to post fifty tiktoks a day and become famous in
a totally different way.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, my editor is constantly haranguing me about having to
do this. And now in real life, my editors and
the publicity people are saying Allison, have you posted that
post we gave you. I don't know where to put
it or what to do with it.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
It always finds the right people.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
The good news is that approximately five billion people listen
to the Bechdel Cast. So let's go with that word.
The word is getting out.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
This is all I need to do.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Then, Yeah, yeah, pretty much? Yeah no, but truly, thank
you so much for joining us. This has been such delightful.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Caitlin and Jamie, thank you. It has indeed been a
delight for me as well.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Thank you for just like being you. You're so cool.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Thanks there you have at everybody. Our interview with Alison Bechdel,
isn't she great? She's so great and we were so
delighted to be able to chat with her and again,
grab her book Spent, grab her other books.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Grab fun Home, Grab are You my Mother? Grabbed Dykes
to Watch Out For? Go see the musical Fun Home.
There's so many options. Also, Deux to Watch Out For
was adapted into a podcast last year. You've got options, yes,
but start with Spent. It's a really, really terrific book.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
It's awesome.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I feel like it's I was afraid to keep making comparisons.
To things, but it also felt kind of like Adaptation Me,
which is a movie I really love.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
Oh yeah no, because it's it's very like meta and.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
It's about writer's block a lot, and like it's if
you enjoy the movie Adaptation, and you should, you will
really enjoy this book as well. Yes, yeah, so we'll
link to everything that. All the relevant links will be
in the description as well as the link to her
book tour. And again, thanks so much to Alison Bechdel
for her work and for being cool enough to come
(43:19):
on this show. Yeah, we're obviously big fans.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
We were so grateful, and we'll post the links on
our link tree as well. So go to link tree
slash Bechdel Cast and then you can also follow us
on Instagram and our Patreon aka Matreon and all the
good stuff. But I'm just so grateful to have been
(43:44):
able to talk to her.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
I know it's it was truly. I still I believe
it happened. I know it was worth waiting nine years for.
And thank you to our listeners for supporting the show
so that it exists for this episode to have happened.
We're very grateful to you, and yeah, we will see
you next week, we will return to your normal programming,
but savor this moment. It probably won't happen again.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
Uh lovey bye, bye bye. The Bechdel Cast is a
production of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis,
produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mola Board. Our theme
song was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Vosskrosenski.
Our logo in merch is designed by Jamie Loftis and
(44:33):
a special thanks to Aristotle Assevedo. For more information about
the podcast, please visit linktree slash Bechdel Cast
On the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
The questions asked if movies have.
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands,
or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zeph and
best start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the Bechdel Cast. It's not April Fools. Maybe
you looked at the title of this episode and thought, no, there's.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
No way that's real. But well, guess what.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Look at the month. It's not April, it's real.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
It's May. And when we were joking on the April
Fool's episode on Snakes on a Plane where we were like,
it's been all leading up to this, that actually applies
to today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It's kind of true. I mean, I cannot believe that
this happened. We recorded this interview yesterday and I can't
believe it. If this is your first episode of the
Bechdel Cast and you're coming here because of our guest,
my name's Jamie.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Loft It, my name is Caitlin Durante.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And this is our podcast where we talk about in
a normal episode. This is a very special episode. It
is just an interview, and not just an interview. It
is the interview, but we're not talking about a movie.
We're talking about living, laughing, loving with you know, she
who shall be named in just a moment. Every week
for almost nine years now, we have talked about your
(01:24):
favorite movies using an intersectional feminist lens, using the and
here's where it gets interesting Bechdel test as a jumping off,
like for a discussion. And normally we would tell you
and the Bechdel test is this thing, and we tell
and someone invented it, and she's our guest today we've
(01:45):
been using her name. I truly have been I've like,
not quite lostly, but I've for years wondered, is she
mad at us? My favorite looping thought to have this
person I've never met who doesn't know I exist, are
they at him? And we can answer definitively, it does.
It doesn't seem it doesn't seem like it. It doesn't
(02:05):
seem like we can't be sure. Maybe she was just
being nice, but it doesn't seem like it. We're so
thrilled to have Alison Bechdel on the show today. We
are talking about a couple of things. We're talking obviously
about the Bechdel Test, but we are also talking about
her new book Spent, which we've both gotten a chance
to read. It will be out right around the time
(02:26):
you're hearing this episode, and it's terrific. So yeah, I
guess what I wanted to say before we start is that,
you know, if you're listening to this, I'm assuming you're
familiar with the Bechdel Test, but if you're not familiar
with the work of Alison Bechdel, that really is where
the good shit is. And the more that we like
(02:49):
revisit her work because, as we've discussed, the Bechdel Test
was a one off joke she made in the eighties
that has become a serious media metric. But so much
of what we actually talk about on this show, intersectional
feminist issues and just trying to survive in a capitalist hellscape.
That is literally what she's been writing about for forty
(03:10):
years in a very funny, thoughtful way. And so you know,
we'll have all the links in the description to her work,
but you know, let this be a reminder if you
haven't picked up in Alison Bechdel book, You simply must,
You simply must.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
You simply must. And also she is touring with her
I think the tour has already kicked off by the
time you are hearing this episode, but she's on a
book tour in possibly a city near you, and so
check out her website her Instagram for tour dates and
(03:47):
be sure to go out and support Are now best
friend Alison Bechtel URBFF and I think, without much further ado,
here's our interview with our best friend, Alison Bechdel Enjoycast.
I'm going to say the very cliche thing that our
(04:09):
guest today needs no introduction, but it's true, and we're
going to introduce her anyway. She is an author and cartoonist.
Her works include Dikes to Watch Out For, Are You
My Mother? Fun Home, and her new comic novel Spent,
which everyone should buy right now. And our podcast is
(04:31):
named after her. It's Alison Bechdel, Hello and well welcome.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Hi Caitlin, Hi Jamie. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Oh We're so happy to have you. It's a dream
come true.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Thank you for naming your podcast after the Bechdel Test.
That's crazy.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Thank you for we were talking about this off Mike. Thank
you for not being mad at us about it. This
is like, this is so surreal. We're so excited to
have you.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I was just listening to some episodes. I I listened
to the Groundhog Day episode because that's one of my
favorite movies. Though of course it doesn't pass.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
The test, and that's one of our very old episodes,
which we are I'm sure humiliated by in the year
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
But well, Caitlin, I learned that you are also a
Pennsylvanian like me.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Yes, yes, I'm originally from rural western Pennsylvania and now
my family lives around the State College area.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
So yeah, you were just in State College? I was, yeah, yeah,
and you went to penn State.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I did. I been doing a little research for my
first degree, which I would never mention, but but yeah,
so we have Pennsylvania roots.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Did you have fun in State College on this recent visit.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
I did. I did a comedy show there at a
theater called the Blue Brick Theater. Everyone checked that out
if you're ever in the State College area. But yeah,
I did a stand up show and it was a
lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Yeah. But anyway, again, thank you so much for being here.
We want to start by just chatting a bit about
your new book, Book Spent, So just to start us off,
tell us a little bit about it, give us an overview,
and we'll go from there.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Spent is a subtitle is a comic novel, because of
course it's told in comics, and it's also hopefully funny.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
It can confirm.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It's a kind of funny mashup of my memoirs that
I've written about me and my life and my comic
strip Likes to Watch out for from back in the
olden days in the eighties and nineties and early aughts,
where I wrote about a whole little community of friends.
In this new book, this new book, Spent, it's funny.
(06:44):
It was. My plan was that it was just going
to be another memoir. It was going to be like
fun Home or Are You My Mother? This book where
I looked at my own life, in this case, looked
at my own life, my financial life, and my relationship
to money and privilege and living in capitalism and everything.
But when I sat down to start working on that,
I just felt like I wanted to go to sleep.
(07:05):
It was just like, oh my God, I can't do that.
And then I got this almost immediately. I had this
great idea, Well, what if I'm writing about a cartoonist
named Alison Bechtel who's trying to write a memoir about
money and just constantly getting distracted by other things. And
so that's what I ended up doing, and it was
much more fun. And one of the directions that it
(07:27):
went off in was my friends in this new book,
my friends who lived down the hill for me in
Vermont are actually some of the old Dikes to watch
out for characters Oh cool, Lois and Ginger and Sparrow
who used to live together in this group house one
hundred years ago and they're still living there and they're
still now, but now they're in their sixties. And it
(07:50):
was really fun to rediscover those people and to start
writing about them again. And I just felt like, oh
my god, I missed you guys. So it's about It's
kind of about me and my real life with my
partner Holly, even though it's also filled with all kinds
of purely fictional scenarios like in the book, Holly and
(08:10):
I live on a pygmy goat sanctuary, which in real
life we do not do. But I just let myself
do whatever I wanted and it was so fun.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, So I kept as I was reading it, I
was like, Oh, this is like Alison Buchdel Avengers Endgame.
It's all of your world's like colliding in this super
cool way.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I don't know that reference, but yes, that's exactly what
I'm going for.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, because how long had it been since you had
worked with the Dykes to watch up for characters?
Speaker 1 (08:40):
A really long time. I wrote my last Dyke's episode
in two thousand and eight, so I can't do that
math anymore. A long time.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
Ago, almost twenty years, seventeen years something.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
It was so cool. Yeah, we're both big fans of
the original comics, so it was really cool kind of
catching up with the character.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
It was really nice. Definitely.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, we're in the process of writing this book. How
long did it take to write? And Yeah, A lot
of what you're talking about in the book has to
do with I mean, it takes place during the pandemic era,
I think mostly in twenty twenty two. How much were
you pulling from your feelings and anxieties of that time?
Speaker 1 (09:21):
A lot? I mean that was the saving grace of it, Like,
you know, everything is just so fucking crazy. Yeah, life
is insane, and it was an outlet for that, and
you know, like a constructive outlet to take all my
anxieties and fears and put them into these characters and
(09:42):
you know, keep them somewhat at arm's length, but also
just to process it all. So I was living through
the news. This is something I missed from the old
days with the comic strip, was it was a way
to respond and figure out what was happening in the
world as it unspooled, because the comic strip was not
just about the carearacter's lives but about the news. So
(10:03):
this was a way to kind of get back to
that modality to you know, keeping track of what like this,
the story was happening in real time. You know, certain
things happen in the news, the characters would respond to them,
and yeah, it happens like between twenty twenty two and
twenty twenty four. I finished it just before the election,
(10:24):
so I had to I didn't know what was going
to happen, so I had to sort of leave things
somewhat open. Oh God, I can't even think about it.
Are we all just having some kind of collective bad dream?
Could that be?
Speaker 4 (10:36):
I hope?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So that being the best case scenario is scary, I mean,
but there's so much of the anxiety is that you're
having that we talk about on the show all the
time now of like trying to make art and connect
with people during a time where it feels like you
have to sort of dissociate in order to even try
to do that, and it's impossible to do without ending
(10:59):
on I mean, like we work for iHeartRadio. That's probably
not good to all of these like you know, constant compromises.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Alison is definitely struggling with those kind of choices in
the book and those decisions, Like it starts with her
getting a very high offer to have her book published
by megalipub, this big evil empire publishing company that you know,
she accepts their offer, but then she's tortured by it.
(11:33):
Just the challenge of creating, of doing anything constructive and
creative in this atmosphere. That's also kind of what the
book is about. And Alison in the book is just
like can't concentrate on anything. She's so upset about the news.
She's flitting from one project to another, which is very
(11:53):
much like my actual creative process.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Same. Yeah, to the point where I never get anything done.
But I also love an aspect of the book is
commentary on the state of Hollywood, basically because they're not
to you know, I'm going to try to avoid spoilers,
but there's a part where the Alison character goes to
La and pitches a show and also visits the set
(12:22):
of a different show. And the way that the creator
of this show has adapted your work or your character's work,
and just the hollywoodification of it all. It's all. It's very,
very funny.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And the detail, one of my favorite details or jokes
in the book is Alison googling how expensive someone's stove is,
because I've definitely done that where I was like, I
don't like that person. Let me find out how much
there's stove costs. And the answer you never like to
hear it.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah, that's Allison is having a zoom session with the
showrunner of the television show that's based on a memoir
that Allison wrote in her youth. It's kind of it's
a way to play with my book fun Home that
got turned into a Broadway musical, and in this book,
Allison's has written a memoir about her father, the taxidermist,
(13:21):
death and Taxidermy. It gets turned into a Prestige TV
series and this woman.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Sadilla cast in the Fake Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
It's starring Benedette Cumberbatch and Sarah Paulson and Aubrey Plaza
as Alison. It's funny. I was talking to someone the
other day doing an interview and they were like, I
googled that show, but I couldn't find anything.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Thought it was real. I'm tue it would be. I mean,
I know that the Alison character is a little resentful
of different creative embellishments that are made, but might have
been a fun show.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
It does sound fun. Yeah, Sadilla is just kicking all
kinds of liberties with Alison's manuscript, and she has this
very fancy wolf stove with red knobs that Alison is
mesmerized by when they have their Zoom meetings.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
That was another I mean, that was another thing that
I don't know. It's just like we've been again, we've
been fans of your work for so long, and seeing
all of these themes and seeing you sort of interface
with work you've done in the past in this book,
especially with the adaptation, I'm so curious, Like, yeah, reflecting
on I mean, I guess we kind of want to
talk about this with the Bechdel Test as well, you know,
(14:34):
creating this tremendously successful work and fun home and then
having it adapted, and then having this version of yourself
in the world that is kind of outside of your control. Yeah,
I mean in your own life. How do you manage that?
Speaker 1 (14:49):
It's weird and crazy? And I managed it in this
case by like writing about it and playing with it
in this book form. It was really fun to get
to just sort of free associate about I don't know,
I feel very lucky that Phone Home turned out as well,
that the musical that was made from Phone Home was
(15:10):
so good, but it could have gone the other way,
and so this was kind of a way of exploring
that possibility.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, speaking of the Bechdel test,
I ever heard of it? We we always say in
the show, like at the beginning of every episode, like
we use this as a jumping off point, and you know,
it's it's to initiate larger conversations. But we're just we're
you know, we're curious about a lot of different things.
(15:37):
As far as I guess, like, when did you first
realize that the Bechdel test that people were using and
applying to media as a metric was becoming like a thing.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It was sometime in the early two thousands. I should
probably try and like, well, I have tried to write
about it somewhere, like on my blogger or something, my blog.
Oh my god, I just can't keep up.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Like substocks are basically blogs, They just go by a
vigilian substacks.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I mean, how many substacks do you guys subscribe to?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
You?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
How are you supposed to keep up with all these people?
Isn't that what newspapers were used to be for?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I feel that I have most of
my inboxes on red substacks.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yeah. I don't know what to do with them anyhow. Wait,
we're digressing. What were we? Oh? Oh the Bechdel Test.
Like yeah, it was like in the early two thousands.
I was like, what, that's crazy. Like I had written
this comic strip, the comic strip from which it got
adapted in nineteen eighty five, like a thousand years ago,
and I didn't really think much about it after that,
(16:48):
you know, I wrote this cartoon. It was the kind
of humor me and my lesbian feminist pals would bandy
about in those days, something that we never thought anyone
outside of that little sub culture would get and so
it was very surprising and gratifying to me to see
it entering this larger realm. I think it was feminist
(17:08):
film students who somehow stumbled on it and felt like
it expressed a useful concept and just started circulating it.
But at first I was a little like, I didn't
mean for it to be real. Way, this is my name?
What are you doing? Right? I mean I never objected
because it was always fine, but it was weird.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
I can only imagine.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And some people, you know, mostly people think I made
this declaration, which I never did.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, just how I kind
of forget how. Yeah, there's two full decades between the
strip and then it becoming this like very commonly cited
media test. That's really bizarre.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, I learned about something called Stigler's law of eponymy
oooh okay, same more, anything that has gotten named after
a person that's eponymous is never named after the actual
person who invented it, but someone sort of obliquely related
to it, like Murphy's Law was not really invented by Murphy,
(18:13):
and in fact, Stiegler's law of economy was not invented
by Stiegler but someone.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Adjacent.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, speaking of the name of the test every so often,
really it is technically called the Bechdel Wallace test. We
try every so often to remind people of the original
context of the town.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That's very good of you.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
We try our best, thank you, But we'd be curious
just to share with our listeners why it's called the
Bechdel Wallace test. And a little more about Liz Wallace.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I feel quite sheepish about this because I honestly have
not been in touch with Liz Wallace since nineteen eighty five.
She was someone in my karate class.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
What that's so cool?
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, I did karate and she was talking about this
one day as we were all changing our clothes, and
I just worked it into my comic stare. I mean
at the time I told her I was doing it,
and she knew that. But in this later iteration, now
that it's become a thing, I've I have had no
contact with her. I don't even know how to find her.
And how can you find someone with a name like that,
It's like very common.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Maybe she's still haunting the karate studio to this day.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Maybe she is.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
That's so cool. But like you said, Allison, I think
that people think that you set out to create this
test that would be used with like those intentions.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
In like a very academic way, which.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
People have done since then because they were inspired by
your test.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
If I had done that, it wouldn't have caught on.
That's the beauty of it.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Yeah, you know, it just has to happen organically. Yes,
But as Jamie was alluding to the origins of the
test that appear in Dykes to Watch Out For, the
implication in the scene is characters discussing basically having to
ship two women together in movies that they watch, because
(20:03):
representation of lesbians in mainstream movies was like virtually non
existent back then. But wait a.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Second, what is this word ship? I am like an
old person. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
That's what we're here for.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Shivving is Jamie, take it away?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Oh gosh, now I'm gonna whiff it. Shipping is basically
fan fiction in your head of like, oh, these I'm
just imagining these two characters together because mainstream movies are
so aggressively heteronormative that they would never put a queer
couple on screen. So I'm trying to think of, like,
what is a classic example, Caitlin of Oh, it happens
(20:41):
in TV all the time.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, what's it called shipping? Like what does that imply.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
That I wish I do? I'm not quite online enough
to know.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Me either, And I'm gonna take a guess and it
might be so wrong, but I wonder if ship comes
from like relationship and they're hoping that these two characters
enter a relationship that I don't know. Actually I maybe
made that up.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Let's go with that.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah, But all this to say, the test has queer
roots that are often erased in this sort of like
more mainstream application of the Bechdel Test. And curious about
your thoughts on that, and also we're curious about how
you feel representation of queer characters in media has evolved
(21:28):
since the test first appears in Dick's To Watch Out
For in the eighties, because there has been some progress
since then where people don't have to ship, you know,
two women together for example, because that does happen on
screen now. So yeah, that's on all that.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Right, Well, yeah, there's been a huge amount of progress.
I'll put that in quotes, because yeah, there's tons of
representation now, but not all of it is great, you
know for sure. And also I just at a certain point,
I just started feeling like, man, I missed the battle
(22:07):
days when like we were in the shadows and no
one knew what we were up to and like we
were just free, you know, it didn't have to be
representing or performing. I don't really want to go back
to that those days, although I don't really have much
say in it since that's whoever're all headed on a
grease pole. But yeah, things improved somewhat.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
Do you have any favorite movies in particular?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Well, here's the thing. I am not like a really
a movie person, so I get really embarrassed when people
ask me, like, what films passed the Bechdel Test? I
don't fucking know.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
And really do the math yourself. Yeah, that's our job.
That's literally our job.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
So yeah, no, I'm so glad you guys are on it.
And in fact, I always laugh because literally Groundhog Day
is one of my favorite movies of all time and
it totally doesn't pass the test. And I was just
listening to your episode on it.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, I mean so many of our favorite movies. That's
like sort of what, I don't know. It's interesting like
having guests on the show over the years and having
the discussion of like it's okay, like your favorite movie
is your favorite movie. We're not here to yell at
you about it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And also sometimes you just want to check out. I
don't want to watch something totally relevant to my life
when I'm trying to relax. That would just not be soothing.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
Yeah, I love escapist media.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, and we to continue the spiral of weirdness. We
call that taking off our Bechdel goggles, when we just
watch a movie and don't think about Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It was actually you know, that strip came out of
the weird cognitive dissonance that I started to experience as
a young woman when I was getting woke, when I
was suddenly realizing, oh my god, the world is like
this huge power play and this half is oppressing this half.
I realized that I couldn't just watch a movie and
(24:02):
enjoy it, that everything was like really racist and oppressive
and rape and you know, you couldn't just you couldn't
check out and watch a movie. So I understand why
you would want to take off your Bechdel goggles.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
I do it every time I go to the movies, and.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
You gotta watch Indiana Jones.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Somehow that's there. It must, Yeah, And then I put
them on when we record episodes of our podcast.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
So that another question we're curious about. Have you heard
we've over the years learned more about sort of other
media metrics inspired by the Bechdel Test. Have you encountered
any of these ye over the years?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, I mean I don't know if if they have
names and stuff, but I know there's ones like are
there two people of color in the movie? Do they
talk to each other about something besides racism or a
white person? But my favorite one is this new climate
one have you heard about that?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I don't think so.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Tell us.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
It's called the climate reality check, and a movie passes
if in a movie that's set in the present or
remotely around the present, climate change has to be acknowledged
and the main character has to be like cognizant of that,
which I think is awesome for sure. Hacks Hacks is
a great example of a show that passes that test
(25:21):
with flying colors, because they're constantly definitely talking about that awesome.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, it does feel like, there's like it has to
be escapist media to happen now and not feature climate
anxiety to some extent.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it's it's just you can't
not mention it or it's just really bad.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I mean, but you've been writing about it for literally decades.
I mean I was going back and reading some old stuff.
I was like, Okay, this is she's been on this.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Lesbians were on the cutting edge. We knew everything back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Always well, you're talking about about sort of how dicks
to watch out. There was a lot of things you
were writing and as you were, you know, getting woke
in your early twenties and throughout your twenties. Yeah, and now,
I mean there is a huge fan base for you
that are you know, queer people of the next generation
and what is it? What is it like sort of
(26:16):
I guess this is a big question. But having those
that role kind of reversed and watching new generation of
people awakened to these issues that you've been talking about
since eighties.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
I love that young people are still reading my work.
I think that's so cool and it doesn't always happen,
but of course it's for a tragic reason. Which is
that they're still dealing with the same shit my generation
was dealing with. But I hear from a lot of
young people that they find it heartening and helpful to
see these people, you know, trying to do what they're
(26:52):
trying to do. So I love that. I've recently learned
something funny, which is that I had this whole bunch
of unintended readers of my comic strip when I was
doing it, which was the children of lesbians. I hear
from so many young or not even so young adults
these days, like people in their thirties who say, you know,
(27:15):
and they're just totally straight, regular people who know my
work intimately because they read it as small children stealing
it from their mother's shelves.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
I love.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So that's really cool too, that I had no idea
those kids were doing that. You never know who's gonna
read your stuff.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Yeah, you truly never do. I love the characters and
spent Jr. And Badger who are I guess it would
be gen Z. Yeah they're gen Z and they come
to less track of all.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Those gens yeah blurs.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
But I love these kids. God, I love JR. And Badger. Jr.
Is the daughter or the child. They're non binary. Jr.
Is the daughter of my characters Sparrow and Stuart, and
back in the day they were just a little kid
like I think there were five when I last had
sight of them. So I had to imagine, how is
(28:11):
j are going to grow up? And what are they
doing now? And she's there at Oberlin, which is where
I went to college. They're they're in a non binary
asexual polycule with a bunch of people, and they are
especially close with Badger this other friend, and the two
(28:31):
of them drop out and come home and move into
Alison's yurt. And it's just my fantasy of wanting to
have children because I never had kids, and I'm always
envious of my friends with children, not really not so
envious that I'm they're going to wish I haven't done anything, Yeah,
but it would be like it. It'd be kind of
cool to have some like grown up kids hanging around.
(28:53):
So I got to play with that idea. And they
come live in the yurt and do their podcast.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yes, yes, that way we are, yeah, podcasting from I
guess what we're asking is can we move in?
Speaker 4 (29:06):
Can we move into your at your definitely real goat sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, well, I definitely don't have a yurt, so you
just got to like live in my office.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Right, that won't be disruptive at all. I am curious
about the character Sheila. I had a lot of fun
sort of because I had just recently reread Fun Home
and then as I as you know, you're sort of
eased into the some Israel some is not of spent,
(29:37):
I was like, wait, did I miss a sister? I
did not miss a sister. I had to check Wikipedia
and I felt at ease. But yeah, there's there's this
conservative sister character. Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Uh? Kind of an amalgamation of you know, I do
have some trump bites in my some consent circles of
my family, and it was a way to write about
that without pinning it on anyone in particular, since it's
about my imaginary sister. But that was very cathartic. You know,
she's trying to get my book banned. She joins this group,
(30:14):
like what's that group called? In real life, they're called
Moms for Liberty, but in my strip, I call them
Liberty Mothers. And she's very envious of Alison, and she's
also writing a counter memoir, because when Alison wrote her
memoir about growing up with their father, the taxidermist, she
(30:35):
totally left her sister out of it, thinking that, well,
you know, it's all just exploring all these different aspects
of the kind of work I've done. And yes, writing
a memoir is a very one sided kind of thing
to do. I thought when I was writing Phone Home
that I was telling like the truth of my family,
but I was just telling my version, And so Allison
(30:56):
is having to grapple with that, like Sheila had a
whole experience that Alice and knew nothing about when they
were young.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
I mean, that's the beauty of this book and your
work in general. There's there's there's so rich, there's such
rich texts. They explore so many things. There's so many
also just relatable and comfortingly familiar moments, Like there's a
scene where the Alison character and her partner go to
their friend's place and they like it's during the pandemic
(31:26):
and they test they do those like by next yeah, yeah,
COVID tests before anyone can enter. And I was just like, exactly,
I did that. Yeah, that was like the first time
I'd seen each other's stoops, right, and I was like,
I haven't seen that in all the you know, post
pandemic media that's come out. I was like, I haven't
actually really seen anyone do that or acknowledge the Well,
(31:50):
it's just that simple, very familiar thing. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
About drawing stuff. You know about comics, you can and
and must show things, show the details of things. And
I just find that also interesting. It was, how do
you do a COVID test? And I would, you know,
got the things out and unwrap stuff and took pictures
and like, it's important to document these things even though
we all don't want to think about it.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It's nice having it between covers. But but but it's
it is really cool. I love your memoir work. But
it is really it was like such a fun way
to like return to your work by saying you comment
on things basically as they're happening, like you used to
do in a weekly strip.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yeah, yeah, I miss that. It's just fun.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, it's incredible. The thing that I really appreciate about
Spent that I also loved about Digs to Watch out
For is like Kaitlyn was just saying, the details of
the world are so specific to when you're writing it,
and the fact that you know a media trend that
(32:59):
we talk about a lot that I think comes from
a good place. But it's like, you know, this is
the book that will solve late capitalism or there are
these you know, broad solutions, and it's like, if everyone
did everything right, then this wouldn't have happened to us.
And what I love about your work is you don't
shy away from any of the problems that are plaguing
(33:21):
everybody to different degrees. But you also are like and
it's very stressful to be a person, and you know
you're not always going to be totally successful and you're
not going to be a perfect anti capitalist every day
because it's hard.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Well, one thing I feel very grateful to young people
for teaching me is that it's not on us. My god.
You know, Okay, Mike generation grew up thinking, Okay, if
I stop eating meat, my one tiny gesture is going
to change the world. And yes, that's good and useful
to do, but it got turned against us, you know,
the fossil fuel industry, the meat industry, they would love
(33:59):
for us all to be torn up with guilt and
anxiety about our personal behavior and that's just ridiculous. They're
the bad guys, not us.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, absolutely, I god, I'm I could go on an
infinity tangent, but I was just reading about how like
mobile gas created the idea of carbon footprints to make
people feel bad and adjust them to the planet's dying.
I'm like, you're sick. Oh yeah, because there are, I mean,
and you're you're the world of your books are populated
(34:30):
with them, like people who want to do right by
the people around them, but feeling so futile in those
individual gestures.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I just love those people. I love how earnest and
good they are, you know, And I want to I
want to. I feel like leftists, progressives in general get
such a fucking bad rap, Like what what is everyone
so exercised about? All we want to do is make
the world a better place? What is the problem? And
so I just wanted to try and really show them
(35:01):
some love.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
You nailed it, thank you, and.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Then sort of to start wrapping stuff up. I mean,
you've in the last ten years your work has been
adapted in all of these different ways. I know that
there was a podcast, there's obviously the musical, and the
book is to some extent about your character navigating TV.
Are there other mediums that you're interested in working in?
Are there like stories you've had on the back burner
(35:28):
that you want to come back to. What are you
excited about right now?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
I guess well, I'm perpetually trying to get an animated
version of Dikes to watch out for happening. But this
hasn't happened yet. But I'm really excited right now. I'm
in the middle of making the audiobook Have Spent Yeah,
which is such a funny project. Like it's all visual
humor and jokes. How do you translate that to something
(35:54):
where people can't see anything, it's just all sound. So
that's been a really fun project, like thinking up sound
effects to tell the story sound. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Yeah. And I mean, speaking of those visual jokes, they're
one of my favorites. Was they're gearing up for they're
like anti colonial, anti Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah. I was like, oh, yeah, we did that.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
We do that. And they're not sure how many toe
Ferky's to get, and so they get one to Furky
and that's on the like cashier conveyor belt, and then
they get another one that's faux Turkey. So it's toe fergyho.
I'm like, genius, perfect, amazing.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Oh good, thank you for noticing.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
But there's so many of those similar jokes that populate
the book, and it's awesome. Yeah, is there any anything
else you want to talk about? Tell us share?
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I don't know. I always go blank when people ask
me that question because I I don't know why, but
I just do. It's like, at this point it's a
Pavlovian response. My mind was completely blank. But feel free
to ask me anything, Ask me anything, anything you've been
wanting to know.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Oh my gosh. I'm like, I feel like when we
found out we were going to talk to you, we
had a million questions and then we were going through
them and they were like, this is stupid.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
No, what's the stupidest one? Ask me the stupidest one?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Oh man, that's Caitlyn.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
What do you what do you think? I don't know
if this is stupid necessarily, but what I am, let's
say curious about is and we've already kind of touched
on this, but maybe to sum it all up, like
I really want to know about your feelings about like
the legacy of the Bechdel Test, especially just considering that
(37:44):
it wasn't originally conceived to be used the way it's
used now, and how there are often, I would say,
kind of misinterpretations of the test where people will say
this movie passes the Bechdel Test for it's a feminist masterpiece,
or sort of the opposite of that, of like, this
(38:04):
movie doesn't pass, and that means it's misogynist trash, you
know that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm
just curious about your thoughts on its function in culture
and its overall legacy.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Well, yeah, I got over my ambivalence about it because
I feel like it's a great thing to have be
my legacy. It sums up in a way what my
work is all about, which is whose stories count, whose
subjectivity matters? And this I feel like our real fundamental
issue as humans is our inability to see outside of
(38:43):
our own little, diminished, puny self and to understand that
other people have their own agency and motivations and drives,
and we don't. Even even in our intimate relationships, we
want to like neutralize that other person so that they're
not in pinging on us. We have to learn to
live with others, to see other people, to actually have
(39:07):
mutual recognition with other people, and to me, that's kind
of what the test is about.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, And what I love about it is, Yeah,
for those kinds of conversations that we've had over the
years where it's like it's a jumping off point and
your work is uniquely like sending people to your work.
You're talking about all of that and have been and
it's just Yeah, it's it's like such an honor to
(39:32):
be able to talk to you well.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Back at Yeah, and thank you so much for doing
this whole project. I love that you're doing it.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
Yeah, eight years strong.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
It's longer than any relationship I've ever had. We're podcast
common law.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Married, love you Jamie.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Let me where are you in the same city where.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
We're both based in La Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, oh cool.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
So if you ever come out to pitch a ta
as your character does and spend look us.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Up, that would be awesome.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
I will do that and we'll speaking of cities and
going places. You are about to do a book tour, Yes,
I am tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Am I coming to La? I gotta look at my thing?
Speaker 2 (40:18):
No, I checked, we checked if you're going to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yes, I am going to San Francisco and Santa Cruz
and a bunch of other places. So check my check
my website and you can find them all. My my blog, sorry,
my blog.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
And we'll speaking of that. Where can people find your blog?
What's oh?
Speaker 1 (40:38):
My blog? You guys. I'm like, so, I can't get
into this social media groove. I have I stopped doing
it now. I'm all rusty and I just hate it.
I just hate Facebook, I hate Twitter. But I have
to do it to get the word out about this book.
If you go to Alisonbechdel dot com, that's easy enough,
(40:59):
and then and hit the blog tab and then you'll
be in the in the Bloggi sphere. I love it,
and you'll see my latest posts.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah that was not to keep going back to the book,
but I also loved the like for promoting a book
or promoting whatever else. They're like, Okay, you actually need
to post fifty tiktoks a day and become famous in
a totally different way.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, my editor is constantly haranguing me about having to
do this. And now in real life, my editors and
the publicity people are saying Allison, have you posted that
post we gave you. I don't know where to put
it or what to do with it.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
It always finds the right people.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
The good news is that approximately five billion people listen
to the Bechdel Cast. So let's go with that word.
The word is getting out.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
This is all I need to do.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Then, Yeah, yeah, pretty much? Yeah no, but truly, thank
you so much for joining us. This has been such delightful.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Caitlin and Jamie, thank you. It has indeed been a
delight for me as well.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Thank you for just like being you. You're so cool.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Thanks there you have at everybody. Our interview with Alison Bechdel,
isn't she great? She's so great and we were so
delighted to be able to chat with her and again,
grab her book Spent, grab her other books.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Grab fun Home, Grab are You my Mother? Grabbed Dykes
to Watch Out For? Go see the musical Fun Home.
There's so many options. Also, Deux to Watch Out For
was adapted into a podcast last year. You've got options, yes,
but start with Spent. It's a really, really terrific book.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
It's awesome.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I feel like it's I was afraid to keep making comparisons.
To things, but it also felt kind of like Adaptation Me,
which is a movie I really love.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
Oh yeah no, because it's it's very like meta and.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
It's about writer's block a lot, and like it's if
you enjoy the movie Adaptation, and you should, you will
really enjoy this book as well. Yes, yeah, so we'll
link to everything that. All the relevant links will be
in the description as well as the link to her
book tour. And again, thanks so much to Alison Bechdel
for her work and for being cool enough to come
(43:19):
on this show. Yeah, we're obviously big fans.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
We were so grateful, and we'll post the links on
our link tree as well. So go to link tree
slash Bechdel Cast and then you can also follow us
on Instagram and our Patreon aka Matreon and all the
good stuff. But I'm just so grateful to have been
(43:44):
able to talk to her.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
I know it's it was truly. I still I believe
it happened. I know it was worth waiting nine years for.
And thank you to our listeners for supporting the show
so that it exists for this episode to have happened.
We're very grateful to you, and yeah, we will see
you next week, we will return to your normal programming,
but savor this moment. It probably won't happen again.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
Uh lovey bye, bye bye. The Bechdel Cast is a
production of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis,
produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mola Board. Our theme
song was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Vosskrosenski.
Our logo in merch is designed by Jamie Loftis and
(44:33):
a special thanks to Aristotle Assevedo. For more information about
the podcast, please visit linktree slash Bechdel Cast
The Bechdel Cast News
Hosts And Creators
Caitlin Durante
Jamie Loftus
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