In her interview with Lynn Emmert, Bechdel discusses the benefit of therapy on her writing. In response to Emmert's half-asked question whether it had helped, she bursted out "Oh my GOD, yeah...It wasn't just the emotional benefits I got from therapy, but a whole way of learning to think psychologically," she elaborated. "Understanding what we were just talking about, these layers and layers of motivations behind people's behaviors." I found this fascinating, as the very same day, visiting writer Martin Moran had mentioned his "great editor" and his "great therapist" as the two biggest helps in writing his book. Obviously therapy mostly develops an understanding of one's self and the people in one's life, but is it also some kind of secret to getting a better grasp on people in general? Could all writers benefit from this "insider info" on our deepest motivations, whether for comics or prose, fiction or non-?
Bechdel mentions sharing her material with her mother, saying that each time it was very "emotionally tumultuous." I think that this depth of emotion is what makes her work so rich, and I think that it never goes too far into sentimentalism or schmaltz because a) Bechdel is an excellent writer and b) she had therapy to sort through her thoughts and memories, to sift out the deeper meaning and the strongest threads to braid together.
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I agree with you that Fun Home manages to explore emotion without falling into a trap of sentimentalism. This was actually what I thought was most interesting about the work. With memoirs there is a fine line between conveying a personal truth and experience and becoming overly focused on or indulgent to a completely subjective sentimentality. Obviously, all memoirs are subjective, but there is a sense with this work that Bechdel is more distanced from events and has a more objective view.
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