Dykes to Watch Out For

"It’s based on Alison Bechdel’s comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran for a long time. The audiobook is adapted from that comic strip—so it has the same characters in some of the same situations, but it was written specifically for audio. It’s so much fun! Graphic novel adaptations are some of my favorite books to listen to. They’re just so creative and interesting—the way that a lot of these productions use a big cast and sound effects. In this one, there are clips of protest speeches from the 1980s. It’s very immersive. It’s a really cool way to listen to a graphic novel. The story is about a group of gay women in a small, Midwestern town in the 1980s. It’s about their lives. They have a lot of drama. They get together and break up. Their friendships go in and out. They’re trying to find jobs, they’re involved in different kinds of activism. It’s a slice-of-life kind of story. It ran before I was old enough to be aware of it. But it’s been collected in various books and I read them all as a teenager and in my early 20s. It’s a very beloved comic among many queer women, I think, especially in the US. It’s just very, very funny, very heartfelt. She really captures the ridiculousness of certain aspects of gay culture in a really lovely way. It’s a cult classic. Yes, I thought it was perfect. It really captured the heart of the original—the way it was cast, the stories they chose to tell. It just felt like a little encapsulation of the comic. For me, as someone who loved the comic, it was really fun to have that experience. But I also think for someone who’s never read the comic, it’s still really fun. It’s only two hours or so, so it’s a quick listen. It’s worth it, even if you don’t have a connection to what it was adapted from."