Are you my mother?
2012
- cartoonists
- comic books, strips
- amerikanisches englisch
- graphic novels
- mother-child relations
- roman
- comic
- new list 20120630
- psychoanalysis
- biography
The story
From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
What it’s like
Dense, hand-inked black-and-white panels with a clean grid, and a lot of them: pages of small framed drawings, hand-lettered captions, and reproduced book spreads, photographs and diary scraps sitting alongside the cartoons. Long stretches of text-heavy narration run beside quiet, nearly still images of Bechdel at her drafting table, a telephone, a shelf of psychology books, a bedroom doorway at night. The sensory world is mostly interior, built from rooms in Bechdel's Pennsylvania childhood home, library stacks, and therapists' offices, with the occasional burst of a full-page drawing for emphasis. Its vibe is wry, searching melancholy with a dry, self-mocking warmth. It suits a slow weekend afternoon, a reading session with a notebook nearby, or a late evening when you want something thoughtful rather than soothing. The pacing is digressive and deliberate, circling back on itself the way memory and research do. Emotionally it follows a grown daughter, sharp and funny and often exasperated, slowly trading her need for a perfect explanation for a cautious, uneasy closeness with a difficult mother. Intensity is low: no violence, no gore, and no sexual content on the page, though it discusses a painful childhood and an unhappy marriage with frankness. For readers who love intellectual memoir, literary self-examination, and comics that think out loud.
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