ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
Six years ago, Alison Bechdel published
"Fun Home," a memoir in comics form that centered primarily
on her father. That book caused something of a sensation. Now she has
come out with a companion piece of sorts, a memoir that focuses on
her relationship with her mother.
Except it's not really a companion
piece at all. The two books are quite different. The earlier book is
more focused and coherent. Of course, the dramatic nature of
Bechdel's father's death helps make it a compelling narrative. This
book has no such built-in hook. Bechdel's mother is still alive, so
the story has neither a real beginning nor nicely wrapped up ending.
This book starts with Bechdel trying to
figure out how to tell her mother about the other book. Actually, it
starts with a dream. The book is in seven chapters, and each of them
opens with a dream. On the next page, she says "I had the dream
about the brook right before I told my mother I was writing a memoir
about my father." Bechdel presents herself driving in her car,
alone, imagining scenarios, how she might tell her mother, how her
mother might react. A few pages later comes the actual revelation.
So one of the things this book is about
is writing the earlier book and how that affected her relationship
with her mother. It is also about Bechdel's history of psychotherapy,
particularly her relationship with two therapists, here called
Jocelyn and Carol, and about how her attempts to understand
psychotherapy also led her to reading everything she could about the
subject. She shows herself reading - and presents excerpts from -
Freud and Jung, for instance. She also is quite taken with a book
called "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller. It
is through Miller she discovers Donald Winnicott, whose ideas about
the relationship between mothers and their children become one of the
foundations of the book.
The book is also a continuation of
Bechdel's own autobiography. If the ealier book concentrated
primarily on her childhood, this book presents her young and middle
adulthood, including her three longest lasting romantic
relationships.
And the book is also about its own
writing. Bechdel makes frequent references to it, and it is of course
a frequent topic of conversation between her mother and her whenever
she presents meetings between them that took place during the writing
of it.
That's a lot of topics for one book,
even a book of dense prose, much less a book presented in comics
form. In the first section, she tells her mother that she has to
rewrite the book, start over completely.
"Ha!" says her mother. "You
have too many strands!"
"I do," Bechdel agrees. "I
just need to tell a story."
"Yes. Narrative is what they
want."
"But it's hard to figure out what
the story is."
Near the end of the book, Bechdel's
mother responds to the first four chapters of the book, which is all
that Bechdel had managed to get drawn at the time. She thinks it
coheres, and has clear themes. Her final pronouncement is: "It's
… it's a metabook."
This strikes a resonant chord with the
author, who presents herself saying "Yeah! It is!"
This conversation is introduced with
the following note:
"The story has no end. But now
it's five years later, and I must manufacture one."
It's a valiant effort, and the book
does cohere, in its own way, and it does have clear themes. But it's
not really a story, not the way the earlier book was a story. And
frankly, while it's well worth reading, "Are You My Mother?"
is not, finally, nearly as good a book as "Fun Home." If
you haven't read that earlier book, go out and find it now and read
it. If you loved it and are looking for more of the same, this isn't
quite it. But it is engaging and thought-provoking and well worth
your time and money.
