Alison Bechdel earned an A.A. at Simon’s Rock of Bard College in 1979 and a B.A. at Oberlin College in 1981. Sadly, it seems the people of the internet are largely uneducated on this topic so that’s really all the information I could gather. She barely even mentions college in her memoir. The most detail she goes into about college is how she spent a year and a half “blissfully English-class-free” but then she realized that she wanted to be a writer and that she needed English class to do so. Probably the most useful thing she learned in her college years was that she was a lesbian; certainly not in the curriculum, but a vitally important realization anyway. Education is really quite a subjective topic anyway, we all learn from our daily lives and Alison learned a lot in her daily life for sure. She learned about family relations, she learned about hiding sexual desires, she even learned about preparing cadavers for funerals. Though Alison didn’t have to pay tuition for this education, she certainly paid her dues with frustration.
*we interrupt this blog post for a link to a very amusing memoir from stand-up comedian Demetri Martin*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKnzPHtf9u4&feature=related
It’s not exactly a memoir but it is certainly self-analytical and reflective of his life. We as the audience learn a lot about him and how he spent his life learning. He talks even about how he learned a multitude of “useless talents” through college because that’s the way he functions, always creating challenges for himself.
Often we are educating ourselves in more ways than we realize and in areas totally unrelated to what we intended to learn about but equally valuable.
-Steven Twigg
