Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon: 'an extraordinarily intimate account of family secrets that manages to be shocking, unsettling and life-affirming at the same time', as Sarah Walters wrote in the Guardian. The Times said it was 'incontestibly the graphic book of the year', while the Observer recently chose it as one of the ten best graphic novels ever published.

While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homsexual, this new memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to one explosively illuminating Dr Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) love life. And, finally, back to Mother - to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

• ISBN10: 0618982507
• ISBN13: 9780618982509
• Publish Date: 1 May 2012
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 21 April 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Imprint: Houghton Mifflin (Trade)
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

The latest foray into the realms of the graphic novel led me to Bechdel's autobiographical works about her parents.

Fun Home, the earlier of the two books, describes her growing up and relationship with her father. Without going into much of the plot and issues, Fun Home offers an exploration into Bechdel's coming to terms with outgrowing the illusions of her childhood whilst exploring works of literature. In a way, one of the aspects that have kept me hooked to the story is Bechdel's connection of her own story and that of the people around her to the plots and characters of literary works and authors.

Are You My Mother? tries to follow up Fun Home with an investigation of Bechdel's relationship with her mother. Although following a similar structure as Fun Home, Are You My Mother? focuses on the analysis of Bechdel's relationship issues from a psychological perspective. Filled with anxiety and compulsion, her introspection at times is little more than a frustrating read, probably because I can't really relate to a lot of the neurosis she seems to have suffered through. The literary aspect of Fun Home is still present in this sequel but it is not at strong as in Fun Home.

So, 3* for Are You My Mother and 4* for Fun Home.

The drawings and artwork in in both are excellent.