Are You My Mother?

by Alison Bechdel

Overall: Bechdel’s second graphic memoir takes on her relationship with her mother the way Fun Home unpacked her relationship with her father.  Using her childhood and adult diaries, family photos, and transcriptions of phone calls with her mother made over years, Bechdel recreates some of the foundational incidents of her life in both words and pictures.  Although my relationship with my mom is very different from Bechdel’s, I found so much I could relate to in this book.  It spoke to me on a deep emotional level.  I read it in less than twenty-four hours, and I know I will read it again.

This is also the memoir of an artist and a lesbian whose work unabashedly represented queer life starting in the early 1980s. Bechdel has been a vocal advocate of women’s rights and representation in art. Her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, is the origin of the Bechdel test, which asks whether a work (usually a film or show) features two women talking to each other about something other than a guy.

Likes: I’ve become a huge fan of the way Bechdel weaves other works into her writing.  This book heavily references the writing of Virginia Woolf and Donald Woods Winnicott and references Freud, Jung, Sylvia Plath, Anne Bradstreet, and Adrienne Rich, among others.  Are You My Mother? lets you literally see into Bechdel’s thought processes as she goes through therapy, lives her life, creates art, and starts to untangle the complicated strands of her mother-daughter relationship.  I appreciate her honesty about her challenges, her emotional complexity, and her willingness to take a step back and try to see things from her mom’s point of view, even things that deeply wounded her. 

Dislikes: really none.  But this one is not for the faint of heart.  It’s not light or funny, as some may expect a cartoonist’s memoir to be.

FYI: suicide, discussion of abortion, divorce, infidelity, parental death, homophobia.