I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

On this week's show, I'm joined by one of the most lauded memorists of our time.

She also just happens to be one of the most notable cartoonists

of our time. Put those two things together and you get a book like Fun Home, one of the New York

Times's 100 best books of the 21st century, or a book like its follow-up, Are You My Mother?

Both were written by Alison Bechtel, who started her career in the early 1980s with the comic strip Dikes to Watch Out for.

Allison has a new book, Spent, a comic novel, which features several characters from that long-running comic.

Allison, welcome to the book review podcast. Thank you, Gilbert. Very happy to be here. So I need to start

with an odd first question. I got an email telling me that when we mentioned your book in our

spring preview episode that I had pronounced your last name wrong and that by extension,

everyone else forever maybe has been pronouncing your last name wrong. Is this true?

It might be true because

I've just, I stopped correcting people a long time ago and I really don't notice when people say

Bechdel as opposed to Bechtel and honestly, I don't care. Okay, okay, Alison Bechdel. I'm glad that

I'm now going to get it right there. Readers who are getting it right there, listeners are going to get it right.

Alison Bechdle, you've written two graphic memoirs, Fun Home, and Are You My Mother?

The first, of course, looked at your father, the second looked at your mother.

And by looking at them, we're seeing you, and we're seeing how you grew up and how you came to be.

This one, of course, is a little different. The main

character is named Allison, like you, and her girlfriend is named Holly, as is yours, and they

live in Vermont, as you do, and Alice has achieved commercial success off a memoir about her father,

as you have. But spent, your new book is not about your real life, is it? Tell me, tell me about it.

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