The Bechdel Cast - ALISON BECHDEL IS ON THE BECHDEL CAST!!!

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

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.

You're listening to an iHeart podcast. On the Bechdel cast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast. Welcome to the Bechdel cast. It's not April Fool's. Maybe you looked at the title of this episode and thought, no, there's no way that's real. But well, guess what? Look at the month. It's not April. 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. 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 Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante. 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 favorite movies using an intersectional feminist lens, using the, and here's where it gets interesting, Bechdel test.

As a jumping off point for discussion. And normally we would tell you, and the Bechel test is this thing and someone invented it and she's our guest today. We've been using her name. I truly have been, I've like not quite lost sleep 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 mad at me? And we can answer definitively. It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't seem like it. We can't be sure. Maybe she was just being nice,

but it doesn't seem like it. We are so thrilled to have Alice in 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 have both gotten a chance to read. It will be out right around the time

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 Alice in Bechdel, that really is where the good shit is. And the more that we revisit her work,

because as we've discussed, the Bechdel test was a one-off joke she made in the 80s 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 40 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 an Alison Bechdel book, you simply must, you simply must simply must. And also she is touring with her. I think the 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 be sure to go out and support our now best friend, Alison Bechdel. Our BFF.

And I think without much further ado, here's our interview with our best friend Alison Bechdel. Enjoy! The Bechdel Cast! I'm going to say the very cliche thing that our 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 Dykes 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 named after her. It's Alison Bechdel. Hello and welcome.

Welcome. Hi, Caitlin. Hi, Jamie. I'm very happy to be here. We're so happy to have you. It's a dream come true. Thank you for naming your podcast after the Bechdel test. That's crazy. Oh, my gosh. Thank you for.

We were talking about this off mic. Thank you for not being mad at us about it. This is so surreal. We're so excited to have you. I was just listening to some episodes. I listened to the Groundhog Day episode because that's one of my favorite movies, though. Of course it doesn't pass the test. And that's one of our very old episodes, uh, which we are I'm sure humiliated by in the year 2025. But well, Caitlin, I learned that you are also a Pennsylvanian like me. Yes, yes. I'm originally from rural

western Pennsylvania and now my family lives around the state college area. So yeah, you were just in state college. I was yeah. And you went to Penn State. I did. I'm doing a little research for my first degree, which I would never mention. But um, but yeah, so we have we have Pennsylvania roots. Did you have fun in State College on this recent visit? I did I did a comedy show there at a theater called the Blue Brick Theater. Everyone check that out if you're ever in this state college area. But yeah, I did a stand up show and it was a lot of fun. Wow. Yeah. But um, anyway, again, thank you so much for being here. We want to start by just chatting a bit about your new 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. Spent is a, the subtitle is a comic novel, because of course it's told in comics and it's also hopefully funny. It is. Can confirm. Oh, good. It's a kind of funny mashup of my memoirs that I've written about me and my life and my comics trip, Dykes to Watch Out For from back in the olden days in the 80s and 90s and early aughts, where I wrote about a whole little community of friends. And in this new book, this new book spent, it's funny.

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. 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 went off in was my friends in this new book, my friends who live down the hill from me in Vermont are actually some of the old Dykes to watch out for characters. Oh cool. Lois and Ginger and Sparrow who used to live together in this group house a hundred years ago and they're still living there and they're still now, but now they're in their 60s and it 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 I live on a pygmy goat sanctuary, which in real life, we do not do, but it just, I just let myself do whatever I wanted and it was so fun. So I kept as I was reading it as like, Oh, this is like, Allison Bechdel Avengers end game. It's all of your worlds like colliding in the super cool way. I don't know that reference. But yes, that's exactly what I'm going for. Yeah, because how long had it been since you had worked with the Dykes to watch out for

characters? Ah, really long time. I wrote my last Dykes episode in 2008. So I can't do that math anymore. A long time ago. Almost 20 years? Yeah. 17 years.

It was so cool. Yeah, we're both big fans of the original comic. So it was it was really cool kind of catching up with the characters. It was really nice. Definitely. Yeah, 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 2022. How much were you pulling from your feelings and anxieties of that time? A lot. I mean, that was the that was the saving grace of it. Like, you know, everything is just so fucking crazy. Yeah, life is insane. And it was a, 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, you know, like a constructive outlet to take all my anxieties and fears and put them into these characters and, 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 characters lives but about the news. So this was a way to kind of get back to that modality to you know I was 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 And yet it happens like between 2022 and 2024. I finished it just before the election. So I had to I didn't know what was going to happen. So I had to sort of leave things somewhat open. God can't even think about it.

And we are just having some kind of collective bad dream. Could that be? I hope so. That's, that being the best case scenario is scary. I mean, but there's so much of like the anxieties 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. I mean, like we work for iHeartRadio,

that's probably not good. And all of these like, you know, constant compromises. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Allison is definitely struggling with those kinds of choices in the book and those decisions. Like it starts with her getting a very high offer to have her book published by Megalopub, this big evil empire publishing company that, you know,

she accepts their offer but then she's tortured by it. 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 Allison 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 much like my actual creative process. 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 not to, you know, I'm going to try to avoid spoilers. But there's a part where the Allison character goes to LA and pitches a show and also visits the set 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. And the detail, one of my favorite details or jokes in the book is Allison 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 their stove costs. And the answer, you never liked to hear it. Yeah, that's Allison is having a Zoom session with the showrunner of the television show that's based on a

memoir that Alison 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 Alison's has written a memoir about her father, the taxidermist, called Death and Taxidermy, and it gets turned into a prestige TV series. And this woman, Sedilla. Great cast in the fake series. Oh yeah, yeah. It's starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sarah Paulson

and Aubrey Plaza as Alison. It's funny, I was talking to someone the other day during an interview, and they were like, I googled that show, but I couldn't find anything. Like, I'm true, it would be, I mean, I know that the the Allison character is a little resentful of different creative embellishments that are made, but might have been a fun show. It does sound fun. Yeah, it's the Sedilla is just taking all kinds of liberties with Allison's manuscript. And she has this very fancy wolf stove with red knobs that Allison is mesmerized by when

they have their zoom meetings. That was another I mean, that was another thing that I don't know, it's just like, we've been again, we've 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 Bechtel test as well, you know, creating this tremendously successful work in 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? 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

reassociate about, I don't know, I feel very lucky that Fun Home turned out as well, that the musical that was made from Fun Home was so good, but it could have gone the other way. And so this was kind of a way of exploring that possibility. Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean speaking of the Bechtel test 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 as far as I guess, like when did you first realize that the Bechtel test that people were using and applying to media as a metric was becoming like a thing?

It was sometime in the early 2000s. I should probably try and like, well, I have tried to write about it somewhere like on my blog or something, my blog. Oh my God, I just can't keep up. Like some stocks are basically blogs, they just go by a bajillion different. What is the substacks? I mean, how many substacks do you guys subscribe to? How are you supposed to keep up with all these people?

Isn't that what newspapers were used to be for? Yeah, yeah. I feel that. I feel I have most of my inboxes unread some stacks. Yeah, I don't know what to do with them. Anyhow, wait, we're digressing. What were we, oh, the whole, the Bechtel test. Like, yeah, it was like in the early 2000s,

I was like, what? That's crazy. Like I had written this comic strip, the comic strip from which it got adapted in 1985, like a thousand years ago. And I didn't really think much about it after that. 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 subculture would get. And so it was very surprising and gratifying to me

to see it entering this larger realm. I think it was feminist 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. This is my name. What are you what are you doing? I mean, I never objected because it was always fine. But it was weird. I can only imagine. And some

people, you know, mostly people think I made this declaration, which I never did. Yeah, that's something I mean, just how I kind of forget how yeah, that there's full two full decades between the strip and then it becoming this like very commonly cited media test that's really bizarre. Well I learned about something called Stigler's law of eponymy. Oh okay, say 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. And in fact, Stigler's law of eponymy was not invented by Stigler, but someone, Stigler's law of eponymy was not invented by Stigler but someone adjacent. Well speaking of the the name of the test every so often we're like it is technically called the Bechtel Wallace test we try every so often to remind people of the original context of the test. That's very good of you.

We try our best. Thank you. But we'd be curious just to share with our listeners why it's called the Bechtel Wallace Test, and a little more about Liz Wallace. I feel quite sheepish about this, because I honestly have not been in touch with Liz Wallace since 1985.

She was someone in my karate class. What? That's so cool. 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 comics. 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 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. Maybe she's still haunting the Karate studio to this day, we don't know. Maybe she is. That's so cool. But like you said, Alison, I think that people think that you set out to create this test that would be used with like those intentions. Yeah, like a very academic

way. Which people have done since then, because they were inspired by your test. If I had done that, it wouldn't have caught on. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, right. It just has to happen organically. 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 representation of lesbians in mainstream movies was like

virtually non-existent back then, but. Wait a second, what is this word ship? I am like an old person. I have no idea what you're talking about. That's what we're here for. Shipping is. Jamie take it away. Oh gosh, now I'm gonna whiff it.

Shipping is basically fan fiction in your head of like, oh, 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 shipping? Oh, it happens in TV all the time.

Yeah. What's it called, shipping? Like, what does that imply? That I wish I knew. I'm not quite online enough to know. 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. I don't know. I maybe made that up. Let's go with that. But all this to say the test has queer roots that are often erased in this sort of like more mainstream application of the Bechtel 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 since the test first appears in Becks 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, thoughts on all that? 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 miss the bad old days when we were in the shadows and no one knew what we were up to. And we were just free, you know?

I didn't have to be representing or performing. I don't really want to go back to those days, although I don't really have much say in it, since that's where we're all headed on a grease pole. But yeah, things things improved somewhat. Do you have any favorite movies in particular? really a movie person. So I get really embarrassed when people ask me like what films pass the Bechdel test. I don't fucking know. And really, do the math yourself. Yeah. That's, that's our job. Yeah, that's literally our job. 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. 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, we're not here to yell at you about it. 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. Yeah, I love escapist media. 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, yeah, 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.

This half is oppressing this half. And I realized that I couldn't just watch a movie and enjoy it, that everything world is like this huge power play this half is oppressing this half and I Realized that I couldn't just watch a movie and enjoy it that everything was like really racist and oppressive and rapey 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 Bechtel goggles I do it every time I go to the movies and I got to watch Indiana Jones somehow. That's must. And then I put them on when we record episodes of our podcast. So another question we're curious about.

Have you heard of we've over the years learned more about sort of other media metrics inspired by the Bechtel test? Have you encountered any of these over the years? Yeah, I mean, I don't know 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? I don't think so. Now tell us. 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 with flying colors because they're constantly talking about that. Awesome. 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. Yeah, I mean it's's it's just you can't not mention it or it's it's just really bad. I mean, but you've 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 lesbians were on the cutting edge. We knew everything back in the day. Always. I will you're talking about, about sort of how Dice to Watch Out for was a lot of things you were writing as you were getting woke in your early 20s and throughout your 20s.

And now, I mean, there is a huge fan base for you that are queer people of the next generation. And what is it like sort of, I guess this is a big question, but having that role kind of reversed and watching a new generation of people awaken to these issues that you've been talking about since the 80s. I love that young people are still reading my work.

I think that's so cool and 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 trying to do. So I love that. I recently learned something funny 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 are not even so young adults. These days like people in their thirties who say you know and they're just totally straight regular people who who know my work intimately because they read it as small children stealing it from their mother's shelves. Oh, I love that.

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. Yeah, you truly never do. I love the characters in Spent, JR and Badger who are I guess it would be Gen Z. Yeah, they're they're Gen Z and they come to live track of all those. Yeah, blurs. But I love these kids got I love JR and Badger. JR is the daughter or the child. They're non-binary, JR is the daughter of my character Sparrow and Stuart. And back in the day, they were just a little kid, like, I think they were five when we last had sight of them. So I had to imagine, how is JR 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 in a non-binary asexual polycule with a bunch of people.

They are especially close with Badger, this other friend. The two of them drop out and come home and move into Allison's yurt. 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 wish I'd done anything. But it would be like, you know, it'd be kind of cool to have some like grown up kids hanging around. So I got to play with that idea and they come live and they yurt and do their podcast. Yes. Yes. That's in a way, podcasting for her.

I guess what we're asking is, can we move in? Can we move into your definitely real goat sanctuary? Yeah. Well, I definitely don't have a yurt. So you just have to like live in my office. Great. 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 you know, you're sort of eased into the some is real, some is not of spent. 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 this conservative sister character. Where did that come from?

Kind of an amalgamation of, you know, I do have some Trump bites in my, some concentric 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, get my book banned. She joins this group like, what's that group called?

In real life, they're called Moms for Liberty, but in my strip I call them Liberty Mothers. She's very envious of Allison and she's also writing a counter memoir because when Allison wrote her memoir about growing up with their father, the taxidermist, she 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 Alison is having to grapple with

that. Like Sheila had a whole experience that Allison knew nothing about when they were young. I mean, that's the beauty of this book and your work in general. There's, there's, there's a 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 and they test, they do those like bynecks, COVID tests before anyone can enter. And I was just like, exactly, I did that.

And that was like the first time I'd seen. They got into their 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 simple, very familiar thing. Yeah. That's the thing about drawing stuff, you know, about comics, you can 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. It's nice having it between covers. But but it's but it's I mean, 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. Yeah, yeah, I miss that. It's just fun. Yeah. it's incredible. The thing that I really appreciate

about Spent that I also loved about Dykes to Watch Out for is, like Caitlin 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 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 as you don't shy away from any of the problems that are plaguing 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. I don't know. Yeah. 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 my generation grew up thinking Okay, if I stop eating meat my one tiny gesture is gonna 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 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. Yeah, absolutely. I, God, 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 fact that the planet is dying.

I'm like, you sickos. Yeah, fucks. Because there are, I mean, and the world of your books are populated with them, like people who want to do right by the people around them, but feeling so futile in those individual gestures. I just love those people. I love how earnest and good they are, you know?

And I wanna, I feel like leftist progressives in general get such a fucking bad rap. Like, what is everyone so exercised about? All we wanna do is make the world a better place. What is the problem? And so I just wanted to try and really show them some love. You nailed it. Thank you. And then just sort of to start wrapping stuff up. I mean, you've in the last 10 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 I in 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 that you want to come back to? What are you excited about right now, I guess? Well, I'm perpetually trying to get an animated version of Dykes to watch out for happening, but that hasn't happened yet. But I'm really excited right now. I'm in the middle of making the audiobook of

Spent, which is such a funny project. It's all visual humor and jokes. How do you translate that to something where people can't see anything? It's just all sound. So that's been a really fun project, like thinking up sound effects and how to tell the story through sound. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, speaking of those visual jokes, they're one of my favorites was they're gearing up for their like anti-colonial anti Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah. I was like, Oh yeah, we do that. And they're not sure how many toe fur keys to get. And so they get one toe fur key and that's on the like cashier conveyor belt.

And then they get another one that's faux Turkey. So it's toe fur key, faux turk. I'm like genius. Perfect. Amazing. Ooh, good. Thank you for noticing. But there's so many of those similar jokes that populate the book and it's awesome.

Um, yeah. Is there, is there any, anything else you want to talk about? Tell us share. I don't know. I always go blank when people ask me that question, cause I, I don't know why, but I just do it's like, at this point, it's a Pavlovian response. My mind goes completely blank, but feel free to ask me anything. Ask me anything. Anything you've been wanting to know. 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. No, they're not good enough. What's the stupidest one? Ask me the stupidest one. Oh, man. That's Caitlin, what do you think? What do you think? I don't know if this is stupid necessarily, but what I am 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 Bechtel test, especially just considering that 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 Bechtel test, therefore it's a

feminist masterpiece or sort of the opposite of that of like, this 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. 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 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 impinging on us. We have to learn to live with others to see other people to have mutual recognition with other people. And to me, that's kind of what

what the test is about. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And 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, um, yeah, it's, it's like such an honor to be able to talk to you. Well, back at you and thank you so much for doing this whole project. I love that you're, you're doing it.

Thank you so much. Yeah. Eight years strong. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. That's longer than any relationship I've ever had. We're saying we're podcast common law married. Love you, Jamie. Love you too. Where are you in the same city? Where are you? We're both based in LA. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, cool. So if you ever come out to pitch a reality TV show as your character does in spent Uh, look us up. That would be awesome. I will do that and well speaking of cities and and going places You are about to do a book tour. Yes. I am. Tell us about that. Am I coming to LA? I gotta look at my thing. No, I checked. We checked. Yeah. You're going to San Francisco. 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 my blog. Sorry, my blog. And well, speaking of that, where can people find your blog? What, my blog. You guys, I'm like so, I can't get into this social media groove. 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 allisonbechdel.com, that's easy enough, and then hit the blog tab, and then you'll be in the blogosphere. Love it. And you'll see my latest posts. 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 50 TikToks

a day and become famous in a totally different way. 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, Alison have you posted that post we gave you? I don't know where to put it or what to do with it. It always finds the right people. The good news is that approximately 5 billion people listen to the Bechdel cast. So let's go with that. The word is getting out. This is all I need to do then. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. No, but truly, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a delightful Caitlin and Jamie. Thank you. It has indeed been a delight for me as well.

Thank you for just like being you. You're so cool. Thanks. There you have it, 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. Grab Fun Home, grab Are You My Mother, grab Dykes to Watch Out For, go see the musical Fun Home. There's so many options. Also Dykes 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 year. You've got options. But start with Spent, it's a really, really terrific book. That's awesome. I feel like it's, I was afraid to keep making comparisons to things, but it also felt kind of like adaptation-y,

which is a movie I really love. Oh, yeah, no, because it's very like meta. And 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 on this show. We're obviously big fans. We were so grateful and we'll post the links on our Linktree as well. So go to Linktree slash Bechtelcast

and then you can also follow us on Instagram and our Patreon aka AKA Matrion, and all the good stuff. But I'm just so grateful to have been able to talk to her. I know, it was truly, I still can't believe it happened. 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 with we'll return to your normal programming but savor this moment. It probably won't happen again. Love you bye. Bye bye. The Bechtel cast is a production of iHeart Media hosted by Caitlin Durante and Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mo Laborde. Our theme song was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Voskrasensky. Our logo and merch is designed by Jamie Loftus and a special thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast, please visit linktree.bechtelcast.

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