Alison Bechdel

Depicts the author's mother as a voracious reader, music lover, and passionate amateur actress who quietly suffers as the wife of a closeted gay artist and withdraws from her young daughter, who searches for answers to the separation later in life.

A Comic Drama

Are You My Mother?

A graphic novel follow-up to Fun Home depicts the author's mother as a voracious reader, music lover and passionate amateur actress who quietly suffers as the wife of a closeted gay artist and withdraws from her young daughter.

Sarah Sammis

Lara Engle

Mired in psychoanalysis, Are You My Mother is comic only in the use of pictures, not in tone. While Fun Home lived and breathed with the complication of family dynamics and the struggle of an artistic family to love one another as individual humans, this book feels like a lot of navel gazing, obsessing over the relationship between Alison and her mother. As always, the mother gets blamed for all of the child's neuroses. The structure is tidy and interesting, but it's not an enjoyable read, despite being well-crafted.

rumbledethumps

I absolutely loved Fun House (by the same author). But where that one hit all the right notes for me, this one just fell flat.

It has a meta-story about her therapy where she learns to accept her relationship with her mother in order to be able to write about it in a follow-up memoir about her other parent (Fun House was a memoir about her father). But, in the words of Cheryl Strayed, "Writing is hard for every last one of us.... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal?"

I'm just not interested in this kind of memoir.

Ana Hein

Jeannette Ordas

Wow, what a heavy read. Very meta, layered, insular and I'm not sure I read it as painstakingly slowly as I should have. There's a lot of psychoanalysis, dream theory and Virginia Woolf and while I appreciated all the work it took for Bechdel to make her peace with her mother, it didn't grab me as much as Fun Home.

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.

Lara Reis

never thought I’d consider reading Laban again

a punch in the stomach would hurt less than reading some chapters of this book. as a gifted child myself, with a narcissistic mother, sometimes I caught myself thinking I was reading my own thoughts and therapy sessions.

Varnika Manral

Maybe I wasn't in the right place and time for this book but I couldn't connect and it's a shame because I had high expectations.

Late in the book, Bechdel's mother, a great literary mind herself, comments that this book about her is a metabook and it is that indeed. In a case where the form reflects the content, Are You My Mother? functions as therapy itself, revealing in detail Bechdel's process in therapy as she not only dealt with her difficult relationship with her mother but the aftermath of her father's suicide and the dysfunction of her family life growing up. This partner, in a way, to Bechdel's earlier memoir, Fun Home, is much more complex in that it deals with a relationship very much alive and evolving as opposed to the clear stop to Bechdel's relationship with her father. A lot of the panels in this book focus on time spent in therapy, time in various romantic relationships, all reflecting the issues that played out from Bechdel's patterns with her own parents as well as her own discovery of the transference of these issues onto important people in her life. Bechdel relies heavily on the text of Virginia Woolf, specifically To the Lighthouse, Susan Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child, and not only the work on transitional objects but the life and experiences of psychoanalysis of pediatrician/analyst Donald Winnicott, in not only telling the story of her relationship with her mother but in using this text that she is creating to come closer to understanding and attempting to repair this relationship. Like Fun Home, this book looks beautiful with even the textual quotations lovingly recreated by Bechdel, but it is like that earlier book in that the text is where Bechdel truly shines, crafting elegant and concise text, not one word out of place. I have not taken as many notes on a book in years as I have with this one. I brought it to my own therapist, this text functioning as a gateway to further explore my own relationship with my mother, one which bears a dynamic eerily similar to that of Bechdel and her mother. Even if it does not serve a therapeutic purpose for all, it is a beautiful book, perfectly merging ideas of self-discovery and the complicated layers of history one has with family and society with that of personally being much more and less insignificant, all at once, than one had previously imagined. It is an ode to language as well as pattern, moving through time as gracefully as Bechdel's pen against the page, as easily as memory.

Savas Yazici

Sometimes the story disappears behind the very theory...

Sam Pulliam

If the topic of graphic novels comes up, I guarantee I will mention Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Ever since I read Fun Home for a class early this year, I've been wanting to read Are You My Mother? This graphic novel follows Alison as she works through and tries to understand her relationship with her mother through therapy and the lens of psychoanalysis. I definitely related to many parts of this book and it made me reflect on my own family. While I prefer Fun Home right now, I definitely enjoyed and appreciated being in the middle of Bechdel's journey (almost "in medias res") to understanding her relationship with her mother.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

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