Review: Are You My Mother? (2012)
30 Comics in 30 Days - I’m reviewing a comic every day in November!
Day 10 - Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Much like Bechdel herself, I have complicated feelings about this book. I once attended a talk where she explained that, for a long time, she considered the book a failure because she could never find things within it – that is to say, the structure was such an incoherent jumble (her words) that she could never locate the moments she was looking for.
The first time I read Are You My Mother?, I felt similarly adrift. It is an extremely disorienting book. The throughline is Bechdel's fraught relationship with her mother; but which mother? There are countless women in her life – therapists, girlfriends – from whom she's sought some part of the affection and validation her "real" mother withheld. The characters are distinct but the timelines overlap and interweave in ways that are either intricate or convoluted (depending on how charitable of a reader you happen to be).
I keep revisiting the book, despite my ambivalence, because Bechdel has a stunning ability to organize and analyze the coincidences in her life, raising seemingly inconsequential details to the level of palpable significance. I could almost believe her life is just more profound and meaningful than anyone else's; but no, it's just a product of her compulsive self-documentation (i.e., years and years of journaling) and her willingness to work really REALLY hard to manufacture a story out of this raw material.
At one point, Bechdel quotes a passage from Virgina Woolf's To The Lighthouse about "symbolical" characters who suggest "a deeper truth than facts" and this is how I feel about Are You My Mother?, except Bechdel finds her transcendent truth through the facts of her life.
Where Fun Home is structured by literary references (to Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, etc.), this book relies more on dense psychoanalytic theory for its connective tissue, and I still can't decide whether these psychoanalytic intrusions into the narrative are profound or frustrating. Despite this, I do still recommend Are You My Mother? to people who liked Fun Home. Just go in expecting a very different book.
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