Was she ambivalent about your success? She was. I was revealing intimate stuff about her life. But that was how I communicated with her. There was no other way to talk to her except by writing a book.

In one of your books, you publish part of a rejection letter you received from the poet Adrienne Rich. You had submitted a personal essay to a literary journal she was editing. Was she right to reject it? Yes. The essay was very self-indulgent and solipsistic. It was about the time my mother stopped kissing me good night when I was 7. That she had actually gone to the trouble of responding to it was almost more encouraging than not.

You draft most of your comics on your computer now. Has technology changed the creative side of your work at all? Google Image Search has been an amazing thing for what I do. My work has become more realistic, because it’s incredibly easy to get pictures of anything in the universe on Google. I’m a method cartoonist; it helps me to see actual things.

In “Fun Home,” you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered? I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.

Among lesbians of a certain generation, there’s an ambivalence about the emergence of the transgender identity. I’m not totally tapped into that world, but I feel like people are more open to the genderqueer identity — they’re trans, but they’re not necessarily having surgery. There’s less of this binary pull, I think.