Motherhood Quote by Alison Bechdel

"My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up"

Alison Bechdel, Cartoonist

About this Quote

There is a deliberate wobble in Bechdel's phrasing: "My mother is, my father certainly was". The verb tense does the emotional heavy lifting. Present tense grants the mother ongoing presence; past tense pins the father to memory, and the adverb "certainly" reads like a small, practiced insistence-a daughter making the record straight while also bracing for whatever complication comes next. That tiny beat of grammar foreshadows the way Bechdel's work treats family as both evidence and mystery.

Calling them "kind of the local intelligentsia" is equally telling. "Kind of" undercuts the status even as it claims it, a modesty shield common to people raised around books but wary of sounding grand. "Local intelligentsia" is gently ironic: intellect here isn't an abstract badge, it's a social role in a small town ecosystem, where being the ones who read, teach, stage plays, or renovate the old house can make you both admired and resented. It's the cultural middle-management of provincial life.

In Bechdel's context-as a cartoonist who made autobiography into an investigative art form-this line works like a panel border: it frames the household as a site where culture was performed. The subtext is that intelligence wasn't just nurtured; it was curated, maybe even weaponized. "They were" suggests a unit, but the split tense hints at unequal legacies: one parent still available to be known, the other preserved as a reputation, a myth, a case file.

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About the Author

Alison Bechdel (born September 10, 1960) is a Cartoonist from USA.

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