Name: Are You My Mother (kf8)
Rating: 3.604166666666667 (48 reviews)
ISBN: 9781473556676

ALISON. BECHDEL

Are You My Mother (kf8)

Alison Bechdel

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.

A Comic Drama

Are You My Mother?

Sarah Sammis

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.

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.

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.

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 (kf8)

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