Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human
Book Reviews
copyright Dec. 1998 Beren deMotier
Don’t Get Me Started by Kate Clinton. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998, 199pp., $22.00.
I will never know what fit of madness was upon me earlier this fall when I first read comedian Kate Clinton’s book, Don’t Get Me Started, a collection of humorous essays about life, the universe and everything, released by Ballantine this last June. I didn’t like it. I didn’t get it. I thought it was “just OK”. An alien must have taken over my brain. It was hormones. I’ll plead the Twinkie defense if I must. And then, having this reaction to the book, I was left for two months pondering my soul’s fate if I dared to question the literary ability of a lesbian icon such as Ms. Clinton. I lambasted myself for not just automatically giving the book the highest accolades because without a doubt she deserves them, just for doing what she’s been doing for eighteen years, impacting every lesbian in America by being out, being funny and taking it on the road. Fortunately, and here I say a prayer to the Goddess of Prescience, I always read any book I intend to review at least twice (and sometimes more), and goodness knows always at the eleventh hour to induce that highest level of pre-literate anxiety. I nearly stepped in it big time. Because, despite my earlier delusions, Kate Clinton can deliver the goods, standing up, or not, and that’s something I was delighted to discover.
Don’t Get Me Started, is in fact, a laugh out loud collection of humorous essays on everything, from growing up Catholic to buying a house in Provincetown. From coming out to her family, to trying to get them to leave her alone once in a while after she’d made the big leap out of the closet. Which in her case was “huge, had a foyer, a turnstile, a few locks, dead bolts, a burglar alarm with code that all had to be deactivated, decoded before [she] could even go for the door handle.” (23)
Kate Clinton has written a book that is blessedly personal. Not just autobiographical, which can merely be an exercise in narcissism, but personal in that she lets her life story just hang out there. Whether it’s telling about her early, not so successful days as a comedian or about a hair-raising experience with trying to find the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, she tells the truth. She illustrates beautifully a sentence she wrote in Don’t Get Me Started: “What is funniest is what is truest and I was interested in telling the truth about my life.”(13) It takes daring to talk about what’s real, and she does. Wisely, she starts at the basics. She wastes no time in getting to those family jugulars, though like any loyal family dog, she has good bite inhibition. She starts out in the introduction detailing the ways in which her family influenced her career as a comedian, both positive and negative, doling out credit where credit is due. She “learned irony and indirection” from her grandfather stealing her icing every Sunday at dinner, distracting her while he made away with her prize (2), she “learned chaos” from her father’s family, who were “wild and much more interesting, so [she] never got to see them enough.” (3) She “learned how to be a straight man” (3) while watching her mother deal with her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s-based delusions, keeping a sober face during dizzying leaps of logic.
When Kate Clinton really gets good and started is when she describes what ensued after taking a leave of absence from teaching high school English. She attended a friend’s writing school. Her experiences there are related briefly but with devastating verisimilitude:
When I first went to the Writers Center I was completely intimidated. I had never been among lesbians. I didn’t know from patchouli or processing. They thought I was a spy from the suburbs, a straight infiltrator. It could have been the Liz Claiborne’s. But the rip-roaring excitement of the ideas, the palpable eroticism of the life of an awakening mind was a great and immediate leveler. We read together, argued fiercely, drank tequila shooters, danced wildly, laughed hysterically, gossiped mercilessly. At times, I thought I might just blow up. (9)
Of course the
inevitable happened, which she goes into in chaste detail. From there she
simply had to come out, which Clinton describes in her chapter “Advokate”,
especially her siblings’ reactions. They ran the gamut, from the classic “Don’t
tell Dad, it could kill him” (25), to the revelation that her other brother,
Bill, “Jumped across the table in a restaurant when [she] came out to him,
hugged [her], and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re getting some!” (25), to the
discovery that her sister Mary had been using her as a topic of conversation
during dinner- “Is Mary’s sister gay? Discuss.” (25)
Kate Clinton’s comedy works best when taken to life’s natural
extremes. Her description of rap lyrics on trial left me weak. Her tale of
performing at an all-girls Catholic high school with a volunteer back-up band,
“preferably lesbian ex-nuns” left me on the floor. She weeded out the
volunteers with a few simple questions: “When you buy a pagan baby, do you buy
it by the pound? Gregorian chant notes, are they round or square?…. Is ‘Eat
his body, drink his blood, and we’ll sing a song of love’ an actual Catholic
song or the national S/M anthem? (It’s both.)” (36) I thought I was going to
die.
She has her bones to pick to be sure. One is the gayby boom. While she credits it with lessening gay and lesbian self-loathing, she also witheringly describes the situation by paraphrasing the old Paul Anka song, “I’m having my baby, what a wonderful way of saying how much I love me.”(43) Which is true true true, even if it hurts. She also says that the “question most asked of lesbians these days is not ‘What do you do in bed?’ but rather ‘Who’s the father?’” (84) However, most lesbian mothers I know would promptly slap them upside the head and say “It’s ‘donor’, you idiot.” Though that may just be me.
All this and using the words “defenestration” and “pontificate” too, my favorite words in the whole entire galaxy. What was I thinking when I first read this book? And sure, it would be better with hand gestures, after all, she herself writes “So here it is. Read it out loud to your friends. Stand up when you do it. Use hand gestures.”(16) But this is really good stuff and we can imagine the rest. We’re big girls, we can handle it.
Kate Clinton ends her books with several closing lines from her stand-up act, and they reflect different times, different years, different places of the moment. But my favorite is the most hostile and reactive (again, that’s probably just me, the one that wanted to slap straight people upside the head, see above):
We can learn from football. Especially that old double reverse. To take insults
as invitations. “You castrating, ball-busting bitch.” Well, okay if you insist. (197)
That she is not. But she is a truth telling, straight shooting, unapologetic dyke. With a sense of humor. Read the book. Share the book. Underline. Stand up. Use hand gestures. It’ll only get better the second time.
Plays Well With Others by Allan Gurganus. New York, Knopf, 19997, 353 pp., $25.00 cloth. ISBN 0-394-58914-9.
Plays Well With Others, the brilliant new book by Allan Gurganus (author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), is above all, a great love story. It is told in stunningly beautiful prose reminiscent of Tom Wolfe and Henry James (modernized and on caffeine) with a touch of Robertson Davies in Gurganus’ elasticized stretching of reality. First there’s the love of the narrator Hartley Mims jr. (writer, naïve guy, and North Carolinian like his creator) toward his great friend the artist Angelina/Alabama Byrnes (painter, failed Southern debutante, fellow VD sufferer). Then there is Hartley’s mammoth, earth shattering and frequently hyperbolic load o’ love for the golden boy of the novel, Robert Christian Gustafson (composer, bisexual god and preacher’s boy from Iowa). And then there is the greatest love, for a time and place plundered suddenly by the pandemic of AIDS, Manhattan in the early eighties.
Plays Well With Others follows Hartley Mims jr. as he arrives in Manhattan, meets Robert, Alabama and a circle of gifted others who all believe they will “make it” in the arts. We experience the rising of careers, of hopes, and the outrage of a disease that at the time could take a healthy-seeming man, and kill him in six weeks flat. The book charts the time before pills, and protest, research, and government redress slowed the inevitable by increasing degrees. Hartley somehow remains healthy, and becomes caretaker of those he has loved so well.
Allan Gurganus writes about the gay community, and our multi-faceted lives with incredible detail and insight. His characters are flesh and blood and messy, if awfully good-looking. He conveniently gives Hartley these words to instruct his writing students on how to bring characters to life:
That about sums up Gurganus’ style. It’s all there, in full detail.
Which may be his only downfall as a writer, as well as his place in glory. Hartley Mims’ obsessive love for Robert Christian Gustafson, and the extolling of that gentleman’s virtues, appearance and charms, takes up a lot of space. As a hopeless romantic who’s written forty-five page letters, I don’t mind, but it’s certainly not minimalist (though Allan Gurganus addressed this criticism at his reading at Powell’s Books on December 2nd and he said that he thought he wrote like Ray Carver, so minimalist was he).
One thing that the book offers which is not everywhere you read these days is innocence. His narrator Hartley Mims jr. is charming, and randy and talented (and every inch his creator from what I witnessed), going to the big city to get away from a future he doesn’t want to a life he couldn’t have imagined. In the days of penicillin and good to go, Hartley symbolizes generosity and goodwill toward man as well as sexual freedom. Gurganus’ sex driven characters all want to get laid, but not at anyone else’s expense or for more motivation than that they’re horny. One scene in which Hartley’s teenage student Tony is playing on a see-saw in the snow with his adult (married) lover while the lover’s four children play nearby, illustrates the book’s ability to show the characters as complex people, well-meaning and full of faults. But basically good.
In the section of the book “After”, which is when AIDS has come among them, Gurganus beautifully alternates scenes involving Hartley caring for and visiting his aging and dying father, and ones of him caring for and visiting his young and dying friends. His character changes due to this process, as does his relationship to fatherhood. When he first comes to Manhattan at thirty-three, Hartley says, “We, deprived of having children, we became ours.”(60) But in coming to terms with caretaking he finds a role he cherishes, “Now, friends, weak, strengthened all in me that was most Fatherly. How proud I was to find I could. A whole new verb tense, “To Dad.” It’d, all along, been latent. A closet case. I’d always, secretly, wanted kids.”(289)
Then Hartley, left alone, has to deal with the aftermath of what has gone before. There are several recurring themes in the book, including Robert’s obsession with the sinking of the Titanic, which foreshadows the plunge into icy waters they would all shortly experience. One such theme is Hartley Mims jr’s attachment to and improvement upon his address books. From boyhood his identity as a gay man was forged and united by whom were in his address book and by the information found there. As he faces a future empty of those he’s known, he faces a practical and moral decision, “What to DO with a decade and a half of their phone numbers and street lore? What’s to become of this now pointless information?”(310)
Allan Gurganus writes that the pandemic “’made men’ even of the ones it killed, especially those.”(193) Plays Well With Others makes that reality known for those that didn’t witness it firsthand in the first, swept under by the tidal wave generation. And would serve as a bittersweet, and often hilarious remembrance for those that did.
Alison Bechdel A. seeks to save our politically incorrect souls, B. to amuse the heck out of us, or C. to do all of the above and a whole lot more. Beren deMotier explores the issues with the creator of Dykes To Watch Out For.
The comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For is, in the words of writer/illustrator Alison Bechdel, “half op-ed and half endless serialized Victorian novel.”
It’s certainly more than a comic.
The strip, penned, inked and written with flair by Bechdel, is a regular pleasure for countless lesbian readers across the nation, who find themselves, their neighbor, or the dyke in the next cube, conspicuously mirrored in the strip. To the uninitiated, Dykes To Watch Out For chronicles the lives of a steady band of characters, hot throbbing dykes at that, who fall in and out of love, get laid, get pregnant (though not from getting laid), get jobs, lose them, and start all over again. While seemingly the on-going adventures of the central character Mo, and the dykes she hangs with, sleeps with and cares deeply about, especially friends such as Sparrow, Ginger and Lois, housemates extraordinaire; Clarice and Toni, lesbian moms, and their son Raffi just for starters, it’s really much more.
In fact, it is a remarkably intelligent strip. Readers that only catch one here or there may dismiss it as lesbian soap, and not realize the three-dimensionalities of the characters and plot. But in the form of the seven collection books, which Bechdel has published to a wide and ever-growing legion of fans, it becomes evident that these are novels in visual form, with dialogue that is accurate, raw and dead on. While following the lives of the characters, Bechdel addresses issues such as insemination, safe sex, the elimination of small business under the weight of chain store competition, and more! All while engaging visually with characters recognizable to us all.
With an eighth collection in the offing, and a new book The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Confessions, Comix and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For in bookstores now, Alison Bechdel is ready to grace us again with her wit and intelligent insight into the world of dykes, tykes and everyday life.
That Bechdel, now thirty-seven, never drew a woman until she was not only an adult but well out of the closet is testimony to the power of the late bloomer. However, she did begin writing and drawing things other than women when still a kid, illustrating her own stories. Though she was an art major at a liberal arts college she ”didn’t learn a hell of a lot about art.” The strip itself occurred “pretty much by accident” she says. When she was twenty-two she was writing to a friend and “drew a funny looking dyke” in the margin of the letter. She named it “Marianne, Dissatisfied with the Breakfast Brew”, and labeled it “Dykes To Watch Out For, plate number 27 ” as if she “had a whole series of these crazy women.”
The idea stuck with her and in 1983 she submitted some drawings to Womanews in New York. Encouraged by the warm response she received, two years later she started sending the strip to other newspapers, and now sixty papers in the United States and Canada carry it.
One of the compelling aspects of the strip is it’s historical perspective. Like going back and reading Doonesbury’s of years past, if you read an older Dykes, you get a strong feel of where the community was and what seemed important when the strips were created. The cultural signifiers are everywhere, from the side of a baby wipe box (“eco-butt wipe” in the strip), to a character’s Lilith Fair T-shirt, Alison Bechdel takes every opportunity to reflect or inform about what is happening in the world. She readily admits that “the characters started out as mouthpieces” but that they have now taken on their own life and she’s “having a hard time squeezing the issues in.”
One of her chief vehicles for squeezing them in comes through Mo, who works at Madwimmin Books where many of the characters work or congregate. Mo is a classic lesbian who falls in love at first lay and is a sucker for a pretty face. But Mo also has the courage of her convictions and doesn’t shrink from telling you all about it. So great is her zeal on most subjects, be it grape harvesting, pesticides, meat products or the use of anti-depressants, that one’s conscience is pricked on any number of points. As irritating as all that righteousness could be, her character represents the best in us and we know it. If Mo were real she’d get cancer from so much personal responsibility, but one can’t help but think she was getting cancer for our sakes and love her for it.
Based on how much the character of Mo clearly resembles Bechdel, I wanted to know how much of Mo was in her or her in Mo. To which Bechdel responded, “Originally, I knew if it had to ring true, I had to write from personal experience so I made Mo kinda like me, in background, age and temperament.” She adds, however, that, “The situations aren’t really based on my real life. It’s all pretty much engineered to cover certain issues… it’s not really autobiographical at all.”
Her characters do ring true, and part of it could be that they are, says Bechdel, “all different parts of my personality.” For example Mo “has a really heightened sense of guilt” which Bechdel admits to sharing. Clarice is her “really driven professional side”, Toni her “domestic side”, and Lois she says, is one of “those kind of girls that always mystified me, so I secretly always wanted to be like Lois, the cool girl.”
Certainly her characters represent how a lot of lesbians live, or did at one time in their lives. When she started the strip and saw how it was being received, Bechdel says her motive “became reflecting lesbian life which [she] never saw anywhere.” This was far before lesbian chic after all. But she also recognizes the limitations of a strip in terms of representing the breadth of lesbian existence, a task of Herculean (or Xenian?) measure and a political hotbed as well. “I gave up trying to represent everyone long ago. I make no pretenses about the fact that I’m representing only a tiny band of the continuum.”
But a very fun and well-drawn tiny band.
Drawing the strip isn’t easy. She says she usually works on two of them at once in a “crazed work binge”, and that it takes about thirty hours from start to finish for each one of her regular bi-weekly strips. I asked Bechdel about the job of putting together the strip, how she got the characters just the way she wanted them. For her “it’s very calculated… going from the writing to the rough sketch is very grueling. It’s like staging a play. You just can’t start drawing… I do a lot of posing in the mirror for the poses of the characters.” In addition to the dialogue and character action, there are scads of cultural references, which have to be researched. “Sometimes I spend as much time on those doo-dads as I do writing the dialogue,” Bechdel says, “It’s like a compulsion.” She’s spent hours surfing the net just looking for a logo for one of the character’s T-shirt. She wants to get it right.
In her new book, The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes To Watch Out For, published by Firebrand, Bechdel finally gets a chance to not only get it right, but to tell you why it’s there in the first place. It’s a fifteenth anniversary book along the lines of Bill Watterson’s tenth anniversary book of Calvin and Hobbes, or Flashback, Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau. It not only includes her strips, but commentary about them too. It features essays as well as all the artwork from her calendars, which aren’t available elsewhere. In this book she addresses why she “never drew women until she was an adult lesbian” (surely something an analyst could have a heyday with), and includes a whole section on feedback she’s gotten over the years such as suggestions by fans on characters they wanted to see. Altogether she says “it’s a cool project” and that she really had a fun time doing it.
For the die-hard Dykes To Watch Out For fan, there’s also a timeline of all the stories since 1987. A blow-by-blow chronology of what the characters were doing and when, which, Bechdel says, was “really painstaking.” But well worth it to the readers for sorting out the lesbian intrigue and incestuous relationships which make the strip all the more believable and lifelike.
How does she manage to keep going all these years, working with the characters? “I guess it’s like doing anything for a long time, you have to find ways to maintain your original spirit. It’s gone from something I do for fun to something I do for my bread and butter. I’m always trying to find ways to stay as fresh as I can with it.”
Her freshness in dialogue only gets better. Her characters talk like real people, including all the um’s, foolish misstatements and guttural noises during sex.
Lesbian mom that I am, I’m especially impressed with the strips dealing with parenthood. In her book Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For there is a strip (page 105 to be exact) involving moms Toni and Clarice. They’ve been arguing over their roles as bread earner and at-home mom and Clarice says, ”Hey! You wanted a kid! This is what it’s like!” And then they stare at each other, the moment filled with regret for words spoken.
Alison Bechdel hits it right on the head, again and again. Her strip catches us with our pants down and our ethics hanging loose, and yanks them back right again with humor and recognition of our perpetual human frailties. I’ll keep watching for those dykes she sends our way, and hope for more.