Are You My Mother?
by Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
290 pages, $22.
ABOUT TWENTY PAGES into Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? you realize that this isn’t a memoir so much as a suspense story, the question being, “Is Bechdel going to be able to pull this off?” Unlike her earlier comic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—which focused on the artist’s fraught relationship with her closeted, funeral-home-owning father, whose death Bechdel suspects was a suicide—this sequel is about her mother, who’s not only hypercritical and deeply ambivalent about her daughter’s success, but is also very much alive. Throughout the book, Bechdel (and the reader) can’t help but imagine this acerbic, withholding woman reading over her shoulder. The artist wants to tell the truth, but the daughter doesn’t want to piss off mom—or hurt her feelings. How on earth is this going to fly?
Fun Home was a groundbreaking, award-winning dazzler that Time magazine named its “Best Book of the Year” for 2006. Can the new book possibly measure up? Of course not. But Bechdel is a pro who knows how to engage her audience. She brings us along as she tries, fails, and tries again to come to terms with the impossible task of writing a book about her mother. Included are countless therapy sessions; many dreams retold; excerpts from other books; musings about Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Dr. Seuss, and psychoanalyst Dr. Winnicott; a look at her parents’ marriage; a tour through her own failed relationships; and even a little Sondheim.
The result is a kind of “meta” memoir, which is to say that it’s a memoir about writing a memoir. If what you crave is a standard narrative arc, you may find this a bit frustrating. But if you’re open enough to appreciate a complex structure that keeps doubling back on itself, pulling in other texts, dipping into dreams, and going off on numerous tangents (or what appear to be tangents), you’ll take this book to heart. Of course, if self-referential doesn’t work for you, you can always just sit back and groove on Bechdel’s beautifully rendered, reality-based drawings, each a striking little work of art itself. But stick with Bechdel through her travails, and you’ll be rewarded with an epiphany that makes the whole convoluted project worthwhile. After looking high and low for her mother, like the baby bird in the book from which her title is borrowed, Bechdel finally gets the answer she’s seeking.
Above all, this is a book about the work of being an artist, about being a creative (and somewhat neurotic) person making a work of art. We watch Bechdel seeking therapy, acting out, undermining relationships, and agonizing endlessly over every last little thing as she tries to realize the “comic drama” that you’re reading. It’s a far cry from Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running comic strip in which Bechdel was a little god with perfect control over her characters. Here, Bechdel herself is a character, and she struggles not only to control things but to understand what the hell is going on.
Are You My Mother? shows you how the creative process works for one artist. And how therapy works, and how screwed up love can be. It’s a book about the way Bechdel’s mother failed her and how the artist had to look elsewhere for what her mom couldn’t give her. It’s a memoir, but it’s also the story of a quest. It’s also, weirdly, a self-help book. It’s about how reading and therapy and art might just help you compensate for what your mother couldn’t give you. And help you understand (and possibly accept) yourself. Not to mention your mother.
Roz Warren is the editor of Dyke Strippers: Lesbian Cartoonists from A to Z. She maintains a website at www.rosalindwarren.com.
