Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Six years after the firestorm of praise for her groundbreaking book about her closeted father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel triumphs again with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama [Kindle]. The new book lacks the propelling plot of the first memoir, but it's more daring and its issues are more interesting. The overall subject is the development of the self, created primarily from three strands: being queer, struggling as an artist, and unraveling the mother-daughter bond. Frequent text quotes are woven in from four authors who become characters in the narrative as well: Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller. (Bechdel's working title was The Drama of the Gifted Mother.) She portrays her prickly, disappointed mom with a fraught sympathy and a groping understanding. The book spends possibly a little too much time at her therapy sessions but the jargon is minimal and the insights are great. And those scenes are enlivened by surprises like this exchange:

Carol: "So when you see this gay cartoonist's work in The New Yorker."

Alison: "Oh, God. It's the worst feeling in the world."

I was suffering at this time from nearly unbearable spasms of professional envy.

Alison: "I feel, annihilated."

Of other cartoonists, of other gay and lesbian writers, of anyone who was at all like me or doing anything remotely similar to what I was doing.

Alison: "I'm not making enough money. The newspapers my strip runs in keep folding or merging."

Alison: "People don't need cartoons about lesbians anymore! You can watch them on tv!"

Alison: "I'm spending more than half my time on this crazy book about my dad and I don't even know if it'll ever get published."

Alison: "So, yeah. When all of the sudden The New Yorker starts running these blase, post-gay cartoons, I feel like, Fuck! What have I been doing with my life?" "Am I going to have to get a job?"

Carol: "Hmm. Your own achievements get erased by other people's."

Alison: "Isn't that how it works?"

Carol: "All this makes me think that in your family there wasn't enough room under one roof for several geniuses. You've reversed your own aggression. You feel guilty for wanting to annihilate others, so you turn it on yourself."

Alison: "Whoa!"

Serious as her subject is, Bechdel hasn't lost her goofball sense of whimsy. The complex drawings perfectly convey her skewered perspective, as when she and her girlfriend are stargazing, lying in a field, and the frame shows the mountains upside down. Even if you never read graphic books, you'll want to own this original, boundary-busting, and altogether marvelous memoir.

Comments

[J.P.]

I'm currently reading this. Was so excited when I saw that my library had ordered it? So far my favorite part (humorous part) is when she stands up in therapy and announces that she is going to go kill people! HA! :)