Review by New York Times Review
IF one is at first glance tempted to dismiss Alison Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?" as a glorified comic strip, one would be wildly and woefully misguided: it is as complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs. Bechdel's previous book, "Fun Home," told the story of her father's secret homosexuality, thwarted artistic expression and ultimate suicide, and of her own coming out in college. "Are You My Mother?" delves into her troubled relationship with her distant, unhappy mother, and into her own difficulties connecting with a series of long-term girlfriends. As she confides her tale, she also addresses her mother's bluntly conflicted reaction to her art, and folds their struggle into the writing of the memoir itself. "I would love to see your name on a book," her mother says. "But not on a book of lesbian cartoons." Bechdel weaves emotional honesty with highbrow deliberation in a way that is never burdensome, and mostly light. "Fun Home" is subtitled "A Family Tragicomic," and in both books the tragedy and the comedy are so consummately entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can't help being fascinated. "Are You My Mother?" manages to incorporate complicated and sometimes arcane references - to psychoanalysis and the theories of the pediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, to the work of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich - into a story that is gripping and funny and radiantly clear. In a sense, Bechdel's innovative form lends itself to the subject: the graphic memoir can reproduce the layering of thought and mimic strands of simultaneous life - the bursts of insight and memory that coexist with a humdrum moment like reading in bed with your lover, or arguing in the kitchen with your mother - in ways that pure prose cannot. Things happen at the same time. Associations are made. The past is superimposed on the present. Thought bubbles and squares complicate and illuminate unobtrusively. There's electricity to the form, to the interaction between pictures and words, between feeling and event, that gives Bechdel's cerebral introspection an immediacy and drama it wouldn't otherwise have. At one point Bechdel has a new lover who is endlessly running off to a political protest or demonstration, or vanishing to rural Massachusetts. Bechdel draws the two of them naked in bed, with a square around the words: "I liked the built-in, distance of this arrangement." There's a fruitful precision to this composition, a productive clash of image and words that tells the whole story of a time or phase in a single frame. Throughout, there are magnificent feats of connectivity, startlingly complex internal monologues that unfold with perfect simplicity. On a two-page spread, Bechdel parses a Dr. Seuss drawing, overlaying letters from her father to her mother; a quote from Seuss's "Sleep Book" about a "plexiglass dome"; a remark about retreating to her "office," a barricaded closet or corner, in her youth; a quote from Winnicott; and an evocative analysis of her childhood relation to family life. In other hands this might collapse into something maddeningly clunky or overelaborate, but Bechdel's structure sustains it. There's a lucidity to Bechdel's work that in certain ways (economy, concision, metaphor) bears more resemblance to poetry than to the dense, wordy introspection of most prose memoirs. The book delivers lightning bolts of revelation, maps of insight and visual snapshots of family entanglements in a singularly beautiful style. Bechdel also captures the rhythms of family communication. She recounts a phone call with her mother: "Hey! I got papers in Philadelphia and Chicago to carry my comic strip," Bechdel says. "For money." Her mother answers: "Hmnh. I have to get the plumber to come back, that pipe is still leaking." Bechdel: "Plus I met with that publisher. I signed a contract to do a book of cartoons." Her mother: "You mean your lesbian cartoons? ... But ... what if somepne sees your name?" "Are You My Mother?" is among many other things a nuanced, sophisticated investigation of the impulse to write or create, the desire, shame, guilt, excitement and shadiness of the process. Bechdel, unremitting in her exploration of her motives, pins down and examines the moral ambiguity of the venture, the detachment and ruthlessness and terror inherent in exposing those close to you, along with the mysterious compulsion to do so. THE book opens with a scene of Bechdel driving and thinking about how to explain to her mother her decision to write a memoir about her father. She rehearses the conversation: "I have something to tell you." "I want to give him a proper funeral. I want to tell the truth." "I don't want to hurt you but I have to do this." "I hope that in time you'll come to understand." Then she thinks: "Oh, that's good. Sanctimonious and patronizing." And as she considers how impossible it is to live and write at the same time, a giant truck - one just like the truck "my father likely jumped in front of" - swerves dangerously into her lane. This is, as Bechdel's mother says, a "metabook." But unlike most metabooks it isn't tiring or draining; it's exhilarating. On a purely human and unliterary level, one has to admire Bechdel's largeness of spirit. She is sharply, intelligently, brutally critical of her mother's failings - her remoteness, her chilliness, her uninterrogated favoring of Bechdel's brothers - and supremely generous, compassionate and unbitter. She quotes Virginia Woolf saying that as soon as she wrote "To the Lighthouse ," "I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. ... I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest." Surely something similar is at work here. Bechdel ends on a graceful note that is difficult to reproduce without the pictures: Her mother, she explains, taught her to be an artist. Over an illustration of mother and daughter playing a strange game called "the crippled child," she writes: "There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. But in its place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. She has given me the way out." I haven't encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time. In fact the book made such a deep impression on me that after reading it, I walked around for days seeing little bits and snatches of my life as Alison Bechdel drawings. This memoir is not just about a mother and a daughter. It also investigates the fraught desire to create. Katie Roiphe, a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, is the author of "Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 22, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With Fun Home (2006), the cartoonist of the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For gave readers a compelling narrative of how she was both formed and misinformed by literature, feminist politics, family dynamics, and her father's visual legacy. She goes well beyond this in her new graphic memoir. The metanarrative follows Bechdel as she researches, writes, and talks about the process of mining and metabolizing the incongruities in her mother's life and the similarities she finds in her own internal processes. Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott, a British child analyst and object-relations theorist, are extensively referenced here, with perfectly elided sequences to aid in understanding how and why Bechdel seeks and finds solace in psychotherapy and analysis; how she and her mother maintain a substantive, though essentially external, relationship; and how the cartoonist relates to her own work. The tension between inner and outer lives is a running motif in both the narrative arc and the imagery. Bechdel's adult insight on how a Dr. Seuss illustration that she loved as a child can be quickly reworked into a mother's womb is just one of many brilliantly realized metaphors. Her lines and angles are sharper than in Fun Home, and yet her self-image and her views of family members, lovers, and analysts are thorough, clear, and kind. Mothers, adult daughters, literati, memoir fans, and psychology readers are among the many who will find this outing a rousing experience. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This may be the most anticipated graphic novel of the year, and the 100,000-copy first printing one of the highest yet for a graphic novel attests to both Bechdel's popularity and the format's vast growth in recent years.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
There was a danger inherent in the bestselling microscopically examined autobiography of Bechdel's Fun Home, namely that further work from this highly impressive artist could disappear so far down the rabbit hole of her own mind that readers might never find their way back out. Her first book since that masterful 2006 chronicle of her closeted father's suicide narrowly avoids that fate, but is all the stronger for risking it. This Jungian "comic drama" finds Bechdel investigating the quiet combat of another relationship: that of her distant, critical mother and her own tangled, self-defeating psyche. Bechdel's art has the same tightly observed aura of her earlier work, but with a deepening and loosening of style. The story, which sketches more of the author's professional and personal life outside of her family, is spiderwebbed with anxiety and self-consciousness ("I was plagued... with a tendency to edit my thoughts before they even took shape"). There's a doubling-back quality, mixed with therapeutic interludes that avoid self-indulgence and are studded with references to creative mentors like Virginia Woolf (another obsessive who yet took daring creative leaps), analyst Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller. Though perhaps not quite as perfectly composed as Fun Home, this is a fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Using the twin lenses of literature and psychoanalysis to peer into both past and present, Bechdel examines her own and her mother's lives, interwoven like M.C. Escher's infinite staircase. Simultaneously, she incorporates a metanarrative about herself documenting this history to produce a complex, almost dizzying tour de force of storytelling. In the same way the "fun" in Fun Home, her award-winning memoir about her father, was intended ironically, the term "comic drama" is similarly multivalent. Certainly, the second work more than matches the first for its blend of drama, poignancy, humor, and an intellectual bricolage that folds in Dr. Seuss, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Virginia Woolf, Bechdel's love life and childhood journals, and her talented mother's thwarted theater career. And as with Fun Home, her realistic black-white-gray inks are accented with color: here, deep red tones. VERDICT A rousing and even more intellectually challenging read than her previous work, Bechdel's new masterpiece toggles between multiple zones of time and the psyche, culminating in a complicated and deeply moving happy ending. Highly recommended for those drawn to Fun Home, literary comics, memoirs, and mother-daughter psychologies. Adult collections. [See LJ's Q&A with the author, ow.ly/ajC42.]-M.C. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dykes to Watch Out For, she raised the bar for graphic narrative with her book debut, Fun Home (2006). That memoir detailed her childhood in the family's funeral home, her closeted and emotionally distant father's bisexuality, his questionable death (an accident that was most likely a suicide) and the author's own coming to terms with her sexuality. On the surface, this is the "mom book" following the previous "dad book." Yet it goes more deeply into the author's own psychology (her therapy, dreams, relationships) and faces a fresh set of challenges. For one thing, the author's mother is not only still alive, but also had very mixed feelings about how much Bechdel had revealed about the family in the first volume. For another, the author's relationship with her mother--who withheld verbal expressions of love and told her daughter she was too old to be tucked in and kissed goodnight when she turned seven--is every bit as complicated as the one she detailed with her father. Thus, Bechdel not only searches for keys to their relationship but perhaps even for surrogate mothers, through therapy, girlfriends and the writing of Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Alice Miller and others. Yet the primary inspiration in this literary memoir is psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose life and work Bechdel explores along with her own. Incidentally, the narrative also encompasses the writing of and response to Fun Home, a work that changed the author's life and elevated her career to a whole new level. She writes that she agonized over the creation of this follow-up for four years. It is a book she had to write, though she struggled mightily to figure out how to write it. Subtitled "A Comic Drama," the narrative provides even fewer laughs than its predecessor but deeper introspection.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
