No Need to Respond
Sophie Corser is a writer and researcher from Birmingham. Her essays have appeared in Too Little/ Too Hard, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. Her first book was about interpretation and authority. She’s now working on a book of memoir and criticism about reading.
Not long ago, I travelled from the UK to Northampton, Massachusetts, to look at over sixty folders full of fanmail. Alison Bechdel—American cartoonist, creator of the ‘Bechdel test’, and author of three graphic memoirs and the comic series Dykes to Watch Out For—has given Smith College Libraries hundreds of letters from her fans, received between 1984 and 2021. So, I spent a week with Bechdel’s readers.
Bechdel invites fanmail: on her long-running blog she still lists a PO box address and states she’s ‘happy to receive snail-mail’. For a time she sold artwork to her fans directly via mail, and by her own admission was once seduced by a fan’s letter. But I didn’t go to Massachusetts to learn more about Bechdel. I went to think about, or imagine, a community of readers. A kind of collective reception.
I made the trip at quite a difficult time. It was the last week of May 2023, and I was apprehensive about the months to come. Early June holds the anniversary of my mother’s death; early July, my father’s. These summer months change as each year passes, but the build up to the one-two of anniversaries can often be the worst bit. 2023 marked eight years since they both died. Some more practical stress was at play, too: August would signal the end of a two-year research fellowship, with only unemployment on my autumn horizon.
My plan for the week was to focus on readers of Bechdel’s first memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—on the outpourings of love that followed the publication of this bestseller in 2006 and its adaptation into a successful musical in 2013. The memoir is about Bechdel’s childhood and college years, her sexual identity, and her father’s sudden death. It’s also very much about reading: the pages of Fun Home are full of literary references, drawings of books and quotations, scenes of reading at home and school. Reading connects Bechdel to her father before and after his early death, aids her understanding of herself as a lesbian, and provides her with ways to think about the revelation of her father’s hidden sexual relationships with other men.
At the Smith College library, however, I found myself equally drawn to the readers of Bechdel’s syndicated bi-weekly comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. Now available to read in wonderfully huge compilation tomes including The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, the comic strip originally ran in several magazines and newspapers across the United States from 1983 to 2008. It follows a group of (mostly) lesbians who age with the comic from their 20s to their 40s: their evolving romantic lives are a major focus, but so are their responses to current events and the ways their politics develop across time.
The characters of DTWOF existed for readers across three decades, and continue to hold great charm for newer readers, like me. When I arrived at the library, in fact, a very young archivist—prepped with knowledge of what I had come to research—gave me a badge emblazoned with the face of DTWOF’s protagonist, Mo.
Working my way through stacks of letters in manila folders, the sense of other lives—of prolonged engagement, lived time, committed reading, and repeat writing—was intense. I’ve since seen a warning about literary fanmail from historian Jonathan Rose, cautioning researchers to ‘remember that these samples over-represent enthusiasts’. Enthusiasts were exactly who I wanted.
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That week, I settled into a rhythm. It was too hot in Northampton, every day, building up to an eventual thunderstorm at the end of the week. Smith is an inexcusably wealthy private liberal arts college for women, sitting slightly uphill from Northampton’s main stretch. With its back turned to the clear economic difficulties experienced by many in town, it overlooks a wooded lake instead.
It was quiet on campus. Term was over, and the only spasms of activity were occasional U-Haul trucks arriving for students emptying their possessions from historic, pastel-coloured houses. I shuttled back and forth daily from a shady picnic bench on the landscaped grounds, through baking, sleepy heat, to a ferociously air-conditioned room in the most glamorous library I have ever worked in.
And I shuttled from anxious worries about the upcoming end of my job, and an ambient sort of loneliness, to a safe, cool space where I thought instead about Bechdel’s readers. I read letters of grief, and queerness, of their reading, their lives. The first time a letter brought me to tears, a librarian caught my eye—and nodded.
Within the Alison Bechdel Papers at the library there were six boxes filed under ‘Reader Response’, each one filled with folders. These folders were hand-labelled by year, but with little consistency and a lot of repetition: ‘Fanmail 2005-6’ but also ‘Fanmail 2005-12’. There was almost zero chronology otherwise, in almost six linear feet of materials; each box might contain mail from anywhere in the full range of 1984-2021, and in no perceivable order. I sensed the files had been filled and stored not by a diligent archivist, but by Bechdel herself. I liked the disorder and decided to read my way through the folders as I found them, seeking no timeline but tracking my progress and photographing as much as possible.
The first few items I saw heralded the strange mix to come:
The torn-off cover of Baltimore’s weekly newspaper Gay Life, featuring a smiling Bechdel.
A long, handwritten letter from a woman in LA, who has given Fun Home to her father and received some family secrets in return.
A typed note from the library secretary of Oberlin College, Bechdel’s alma mater, offering commiserations on the death of her mother.
A script about a popular American brand of salt.
A handmade comic about a bicycle accident, created for a middle school assignment (and graded ‘A’).
A letter from a man whose father has recently died at sixty-five, the same age as my own.
As someone interested in literary reception, I have spent years thinking and writing about how readers interact with books—about the afterlife of literature. I have always tried to take care with my use of terms like ‘the reader’ or ‘readers’: forever seeking to clarify that I mean to be as inclusive, flexible, and plural as possible. That short week with Bechdel’s letters, however, made me wonder at how I had previously thought about readers. About what other readers bring to texts. Or maybe, I mean: I wondered if I had ever really felt with other readers.
Mostly, with those real yet imagined readers, I felt overwhelmed. By their lives, emotions, stories, responses. Their intensity and vulnerability. I got upset when I could see handmade edits or additions to a letter—as if I couldn’t bear the idea of a letter-writer worrying over what they’d committed to paper. I stared at and photographed a packet of seeds that a fan sent to Bechdel in 1989, pathetically stuck on the evidence that these literal forget-me-nots were never planted. (What if I stole them, put them in the earth nearby? Would they still grow? Might they mess up the grand perfection of the Smith campus?)
I was also overwhelmed by my own discomfort. I’m not a historian. I don’t have a good answer for the ethics of what I was doing—of what I was reading. I even turned some letters over, choosing to simply hide from the confessions of other readers. These readers who had never chosen for me to know, or to read, something of them.
I tried for a time to just collect specific parts, fragments, maybe to find some discipline—maybe to create distance and make my reading more bearable. I photographed the postage stamps on each envelope, often clearly chosen with consideration by senders. The different ‘thank you’s in print and cursive, marker, fountain pen, pencil. And the many ways that the authors of letters, postcards, notes, comics, and doodles, would offer one particular reassurance again and again:
no need to respond
Please don’t feel obligated to respond to this note
PS. Enjoy. No reply necessary
No need to respond! Just enjoy and recycle
From one angle, I suppose, the connection sought through this fanmail is with Bechdel. But to me it seems clear that, for many readers, a heart-held link with Bechdel or her work exists already, as expressed by their letters. No need to respond!
And what relationships exist between or beyond these readers now? Is the key point of connection with the author who kept hundreds of letters from strangers for decades? The rarefied physical space of the archive in which those letters now live? Or the weepy researcher who, thanks to the boons of institutional permission and a small grant, can spend a week in their company?
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I knew I would find grieving readers. To be honest, I went looking for them. For something shared: readers who, like me, experience Bechdel’s mush of understanding queerness and parental loss in Fun Home as near-unbearable. For readers who also, perhaps, did not come out to their parents, and now never can. Often, my own uncommunicated queerness feels like the least of my worries within the grand and awful absence I have felt since my parents died when I was 27. But sometimes, it is the sharpest and most unbearable part of that bereavement: to have been, somehow, unknown to them.
And questions of knowing and being known by one’s parents did recur reliably and painfully across the letters I saw at the library, especially those sent in response to Fun Home. Letters from readers who struggled, like the memoir itself, with the hard limits of secrets, the closet, and death.
But I wasn’t expecting, among the loss, regret, and hope in faded inkjet print or blue biro, to grieve for other readers. To find a new shape of connection, forged through reading.
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I’m going to call them Nora and Patricia, false names to protect real people. The first card I found was, I thought, a mistake: it appeared to be a personal piece of correspondence incorrectly filed within a stack of Christmas cards in ‘Fanmail 2005-2012’. This card contained a newsletter, a festive round robin in exemplary mid-2000s word processing style, addressed to the ‘friends and family’ of Nora and Patricia in 2005. And on the cover of the card? An exquisite hand-drawn cartoon queering of a Jan Van Eyck couple, presumably portraying Nora and Patricia themselves. This was day one at the library—their card was by no means the first piece of fan art I’d seen in the collected letters, but it was the nicest by far.
There they were again, that afternoon, in the next folder. Nora and Patricia’s faces appearing this time within a cartoon of an Ancient Greek vase. Two women swathed in finely drawn pleated fabric, and a ‘Happy Holidays’ message for 2007. This iteration of the newsletter was wonderful: funny, smart, laden with hefty presumptions of intimacy. There are important haircuts to report, new careers, big holidays, milestone birthdays.
Feeling invasive but excited, I thought about looking this gorgeous couple up on the internet. Just a quick search. I wanted so badly to read more about them—particularly Nora, who had signed the back of the cards, presumably as their gifted artist.
In my inconsistent notes from that week, I have feebly typed ‘I am crying’ to mark my online discovery of a 2022 obituary for Nora. She died at 63, just under a decade after marrying Patricia.
But later the same day, back in the folders, I found them again. Already recognising Nora’s handwriting on an envelope, I rushed with urgency past other correspondence to reach my lovebirds while they are still together. This time, as 2008 turned to 2009, they hold candles and look at the moon, both in jeans, both with cropped hair. In the newsletter, Patricia has almost finished her career-change PhD, and they are both hopeful about Obama.
In my notes from the next day, I’ve confessed to now looking out specifically for Nora and Patricia. And I found them. 2003: Nora and Patricia are wise men bearing gifts on either side of a camel. 2004: they’re glammed up on public transit with a goose, a chicken, and a cow. Another day, another box, a folder marked ‘Fanmail 1999-2002’: feeding Christmas candy to a rabbit, they sit together in front of a vast picture window with a city view. ‘Happy Y2K, Alison!’, Nora has written inside the card. I scored again soon after, a card from 1998—only here there was also a scribble from Bechdel.
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I found marks from Bechdel’s red pen dotted sporadically across the mass of fanmail. Mostly brief notes recording just a date and ‘sent card’ or ‘sent short letter’. These notes gave one reason for the fanmail archive and why all the letters were kept in the first place, before they came to rest at Smith College. Bechdel wrote back. Her scribbles evidenced an impressive level of response, and presumably helped her to keep track. In their newer context in the library, however, the red scrawls forced Bechdel’s presence: the careful correspondent, self-archivist, collector, hoarder.
A lot of writing about fanmail focuses on what amassed letters can tell us about their object: about the author each letter is addressed to, rather than about the fans who sent the letters. Even when researchers do show an interest in how fanmail expresses or shapes a kinship between fans and their favourites, this is again generally used to shed light on the author, artist, or musician who prompts such fandom, rather than the reader, viewer, or listener who feels strongly enough to write a letter.
As I’ve insisted already, I didn’t spend a week at a library out of an interest in Bechdel herself. Nor do I think that the most remarkable connection made possible by these grouped letters is between Bechdel-and-fan. Obviously, I understand every letter I read was addressed to Bechdel and that her beloved memoirs are about Bechdel. But I will always find the origin point or creation of a literary text far less exciting than what happens next. I want the reading, the reception, the transmission.
But there Bechdel was, scrawling in the margins, labelling envelopes: ‘sent nice note’, ‘sent short email’. Or, as scribbled on that 1998 card from Nora and Patricia (medieval yuletide theme feat. tunics, crowns, and a rabbit in a manger): just a red tick and a date. Enough to remind me that it was not only Bechdel’s art that spawned these responses; but also Bechdel’s dedicated collecting that made my week of reading possible.
Regardless of their intrusion, I was glad to only have these brief notes from Bechdel—glad, I mean, to not have her actual replies. The physical cards and letters she sent out across the United States, Canada, the UK, France, or Japan. Before travelling to Northampton, I’d read an excellent essay by the critic Hannah Gold about her own odd days in an archive. Via a clunky, library-issued laptop and what sounds like near-unusable software, Gold accesses the preserved email correspondence of author Chris Kraus: 74,164 emails. She pieces together the digital back-and-forth between, for example, Kraus and writer Eileen Myles during one summer in Florence; Kraus and a co-editor she conspires with; Kraus and a minister who will ordain her wedding. Gold must also seek permission from Kraus herself, in order to publish: ‘After my days in her collections, I email Kraus the details of her marriage. I quote Kraus to Kraus, allowing her to draw the boundaries of her own exposure.’
What about the quotes from Myles, I wonder. Was their permission required, or sought? What about Nora and Patricia? Have I masked them enough to prevent their exposure? I’ve used pseudonyms, changed details, quoted minimally: I’ve followed the conventions for anonymising fans. But by writing to Bechdel could they consent to be collected, browsed, written about?
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Evidence of Bechdel’s response did at least explain why Nora and Patricia continued to send festive cards and personal newsletters, while Bechdel continued to sort them into piles designated ‘fanmail’. Whatever correspondence they’d exchanged, it led Nora and Patricia to add Bechdel to their Christmas mailing list of friends and family—but that sense of intimacy was evidentially not reciprocated by Bechdel, who wrote back to so many fans.
A couple more days, and a couple more boxes—I continued through several folders of 1990s fanmail and found Nora drawn alone. The point at which Nora refers to her ‘wonderfully new True Love’ Patricia, in a card for 1996 (Nora and a rabbit play with plumes of tinsel). The 1994 card (Nora sits serenely atop a cow, being led by an angel) with a note confessing how a break-up in DTWOF helped Nora survive her own, plus another Bechdel biro scribble, ‘Sent card 1-9-95’. The next year’s card (Nora looks decorative with two lambs): ‘Merry Christmas, solstice, whatever’ in Nora’s handwriting, and ‘short letter, 6/96’ in Bechdel’s.
Time skipped forward and back across the 1990s and 2000s: Nora and Patricia wear party hats and dance in front of a Christmas tree in 2009. Nora decorates a tree alone in 1993. And Nora emerges from a chimney, bearing gifts, in 1992: potentially the first card she sent to Bechdel, found on my final day at the library. ‘Alison – Thanks for a year of terrific, insightful cartoons. I LOVE your work.’
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During the afternoon of that final day in Northampton, the wind picked up. A promised thunderstorm arrived loud and boisterous in the early evening. I left for home the next morning: a bus, a train, the T, and an overnight flight from Boston to London Heathrow.
On the flight I almost collapsed. I woke feeling dizzy in the middle of the night, and was rescued by a flight attendant who sat me down in the funny metallic slice of kitchen at the back of the plane. I was given juice, a biscuit, and then an oxygen mask. The chatty attendants had time to spare as most passengers slept, so they fussed around me, saying ‘this happens all the time’. It was no big deal, maybe I’d just got too hot? But was I anxious, was I ‘going through something’? I shook my head.
I should not have looked up Nora online. Learning of her recent death surely changed how I read—how I searched for—the cards from her and Patricia. It also felt like I’d broken an agreement, pushed past the fragile acceptability of reading about their lives within the sanctified collection of fanmail. What did I want from searching online for Nora? Surely not an unnerving and parasocial grief.
But then, nearly everything I read that week produced an intimacy that was never designed for me. I saw semi-nude photos, amateur erotic paintings, a wedding invitation; letters from prisons, psychiatric facilities, hospitals; notes from people who knew Bechdel personally or had met her at signings, talks, book launches. I recognised names: a writer I’d heard of, a critic I’d read, even an ex-colleague.
It was overwhelming. But it was also what I wanted. Enthusiastic readers, grieving readers. Giddy and silly readers. The intensity of their letters expressed their intensity as readers, and made connection possible: between the collected fans, and now with me. In grief and giddiness, together. How can I ever read Bechdel’s comics or memoirs again, without thinking of Nora?
Nora and Patricia weren’t among the many, many readers who’d sent letters to Bechdel about losing a parent or coming out. There was little in their cards and newsletters that I particularly identified with, beyond also being queer women who liked DTWOF. They weren’t even the most prolific repeat letter writers, not by far. But their cards took on a talismanic status that week; they represent the mass of readers still held so strangely in my imagination.
Back home in London, jetlag ushered in the rest of the summer and a stream of unsuccessful job applications. June and July passed, the anniversaries forcing an annual return to memories of sick and dying parents. I struggle generally to keep new summer memories now, even after years of shifting grief. Yet that week with Bechdel’s readers remains clear and strong: the heat of Northampton, raspberry iced tea, neat yellow library request slips. In the fanmail, I found the community of response I was looking for. I keep the memory close. I hold on.