Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Mommy issues 😛

I was a fan of Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For back in the early 90s, but this is my first book length Bechdel. I liked it! This is at once a memoir and analysis of Bechdel's relationship with her mother from childhood to the present and a mini course on the life and psychological theories of D. W. Winnicott, who is known for his insights into children's psychological development.

Bechdel is open about her struggles with not feeling loved and valued by her mother (or, secondarily, by anyone else), depicting herself in therapy sessions, in conversations with her mom where she looks for affirmation and doesn't receive it, and in relationships with women who are ambivalent about committing to her. Her use of WInnicott's theories to analyze what might have been going on between her and her mother is a little technical and dry for someone not used to reading psychology texts, but her illustrations and the bits of information about Winnicott's life that she provides helped me through. Virginia Woolf and her novel To the Lighthouse also figure in this book. My favorite parts were when the text of the comic was about something from Winnicott or To the Lighthouse, but the illustration showed Bechdel and her mother having an interaction.

Overall, I'd recommend this if you already like Alison Bechdel or if you struggle with your relationship with your mom. Either way, it's insightful, compassionate, and the illustrations are great.

I don't think anyone is going to make an award-winning musical out of this one! I was looking for a saga of Bechdel's relationship with her mother that would parallel what [b:Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 26135825 Fun Home A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440097020l/26135825.SY75.jpg 911368] did for her relationship with her father. But I ended up sorely disappointed. Belying the title, Are You My Mother? focuses primarily on Bechdel's own psychoanalysis, her strange dreams, and how the writings of Freud, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, and lesser known psychologist Donald Winnicott inform her understanding of her self and the mother-daughter relationship. The result has little emotional resonance, despite its emphasis on insight and healing through therapy. Even the drawings, most of which show Bechdel talking to her analyst, feel stilted. Decided not to rate it because it would feel like I am rating the author's life, not her work.

Not as good as Fun Home and Dykes – very meta, almost solipsistic, and I'm not sure the graphic form was the best to parse so much quotation from the very dense Winnicott. But still as always compelling and heartbreaking.

(Disclaimer: a close friend of mine really liked this book; another friend, I see now, gave it five stars. Both are intelligent people. So it's entirely possible that I'm just not smart enough to get it.)That said: ugh. This is basically a collection of Bechdel's Kindle Clippings, sentences she really REALLY likes from the works of an obscure psychoanalyst and Virginia Woolf and a few others, with annotations of why they are JUST SO AMAZING; toss in long tedious play-by-plays of her own psychotherapy sessions; add lots of her own dreams; sprinkle liberally with insecurities and neuroses, add just the bare minimum of Bechdel's beautiful art, and send it to a publisher.Bechdel is brilliant. Talented, intelligent, compassionate. Adorable, too, I'm sure (a recurring theme). [b:Fun Home 38990 Fun Home A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327652831l/38990.SY75.jpg 911368] is poignant, touching, witty, wonderful. Insightful. But this one... is not her best work. It's tedious, unengaging.Virginia Woolf, Bechdel informs us, felt liberated of her mother after having written “To the Lighthouse”. I get the feeling Bechdel learned that and set off to liberate her own self. She very clearly needed to write this—and I earnestly hope it was successful, that she got what she needed. But I didn't need to read it, nor, I think, do you.

Wow, this book was frustrating. Under the guise of writing about her mother, Alison Bechdel mostly explored A) her own insecurity and B) pyschoanalysis. So much psychoanalysis. Mostly Winnicott. So, I mean, on the one hand, psychoanalysis is a widely debunked borderline pseudo-science. And on the other hand, it seems to have loaned Alison Bechdel a lot of insight. Maybe not so much personal growth in that she's still writing books “about her mother” about psychoanalysis, including transcribed passages of her life that she was explicitly told not to write down by her psychoanalysis (including transcribing that she's not supposed to be writing them down.) But I have a lot of insight into the inner life of Alison Bechdel now?

This memoir is harsh, honestly. Not really so much on Alison Bechdel's mother, who comes off feeling pretty distant for an ostensible focal point, but on Alison herself, who pulls no punches in depicting her insecurity, fear of commitment and transference to psychiatrists. It was pretty uncomfortable reading.

I loved Fun Home and so looked forward to reading this. But I was terribly disappointed by this. It just dragged on and on for far too long and felt like it was talking about the same tiny things. It felt too personal and like it was trying too hard to make me care about this fraught relationship of hers and how it influenced her. I just got so annoyed with the constant self-psychoanalyzing and the dream interpreting. I get it. You have issues with your mom and dad. But I just didn't feel like I needed to read this. Maybe I'm biased because my psych classes teach me that psychoanalytic theory is more outdated and out of favor, but I just felt like this was a lot of mumbo jumbo from someone who really didn't know a ton about psychology. This book ended up not really being about her mom at all and more about how she wrote this book and how her mom was uncomfortable with it. I don't know exactly why I disliked this so much and I'm sure Bechdel would have some psychoanalytic reason for why but I just don't give a crap.

This is good. It's pretty heavy at times and gets deep into some Freudian psychology stuff that I have complicated feelings about, but I've never read a memoir / psychology primer in graphic novel form before so that was interesting.

Hmm. I definitely appreciated this book–I almost always love painful honesty, and that's pretty much Alison Bechdel's jam. There's a lot of layers here, like there were in [b:Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 38990 Fun Home A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327652831s/38990.jpg 911368], which I loved. I think..... hmm. Hm. A LOT of this book was rehashing Alison Bechdel's therapy sessions, which does make for an interesting confessional vibe, but which can also get kind of draggy? I had to read this in slow, thoughtful chunks. Worth the effort.

Too much therapy . . .. But the book definitely had me thinking about families and how they work and don't work.

P. 201 “yeah, but don't you think that if you write minutely and rigorously about your own life, you can, you know, transcend your particular self?”
An unqualified “ yes” from me.

Reread in 2022 after ~ten years and two kids and as they say, it hits different. Five stars, again.

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.