Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

2012 • 290 pages

Ratings35

Average rating3.7

15

Marvelous and thought-provoking. I really enjoyed Fun Home and was worried this would be too much of a good thing, but it's an excellent complement to Bechdel's earlier memoir. There is Freud and Jung and psychoanalysis and Virginia Woolf and dreams and Adrienne Rich and Winnie-the-Pooh and writing and letters from her father to her mother and Sylvia Plath and Dr. Seuss and Stonehenge and professional envy and Anne Bradstreet and every good thing. She draws all these threads together into a stunning story of growth and discovery, weaving back and forth across time and therapists and girlfriends and bringing it all together in I don't even know what – something fabulous that hits home. It made me think a lot about my own childhood and my own relationship with my mother, which is nothing like Bechdel's and yet very similar.

Also: Maud Newton interviewed Alison Bechdel back in the spring; read it here.

August 11, 2012