Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

After writing Fun Home about her father, Alison Bechdel felt the need to write a book about her mother. Her mother did not approve. She already felt exposed by Alison's first book and didn't want to open herself up to even more scrutiny.

While I enjoyed Fun Home, I felt that Are You My Mother? got blurred too much by psychoanalysis and external flotsam. The author was heavily immersed in the writings of Donald Winnicott, a psychoanalyst and pediatrician who studied child/mother relationships. She was drawn to his work because she was trying to discover more about her own relationship with her mother. Already part of a fairly non-demonstrative family, she essentially felt abandoned and less worthy than her brothers when her mother abruptly stopped kissing her goodnight at age seven.

As she's showing her experiences with her mother in the frames, many are captioned with Winnicott's theories as to why mothers don't always properly bond with their infants. She also has references sprinkled throughout analyzing the relationships in Virginia Woolf's work, as well as revealing visits with her own therapists whom she confides in over the years. While I appreciate this duality of storytelling and its unique form, for me personally, it got in the way and felt excessive. 

It's not to say that Alison hides behind these sub-stories but I feel that they overshadow her own. It makes sense how she's incorporated these additional references into her own body of work, but after some time, it feels as though we're not getting a focused enough picture of her relationship with her mother. It must be hard to feel compelled to write a memoir when the subject of the memoir is reluctant to be written about. At one point, her mother quotes the following by Dorothy Gallagher about memoirs during one of their conversations: "The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story, not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story." followed abruptly by "I know! Family be damned!" You can sense the unease of her mother throughout the book and a walking-on-eggshells quality to how Alison writes about her. She tries to be as candid as possible, but somehow, with all of these extras going on, I feel that a large part of the narrative is missing. In comparison, Fun Home was written after the death of Alison's father. Perhaps while attempting to write about an uneasy relationship while the other person is still alive (and let's not forget, not entirely supportive of the entire endeavour) was just too much of an obstacle. 

In any case, the author must write what they are compelled to write even if, like life, the story isn't always so straightforward.

Judge the cover: 2/5