Alison Bechdel

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

It was a discomfort well worth yielding to, about which I had no qualms.

My realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing.

The line between the two was blurred, as it was in many of his dealings with us.

I feel like I’m trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while looking at the pieces upside down.

I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete.

He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.

But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

In this way, my father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, that end was a beginning for our story.

It’s hard to trust a person if you don’t know where their boundaries are.