For three decades, Alison Bechdel has been challenging and transforming aesthetic boundaries. First as a lesbian, whose comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, was widely syndicated for 25-years, and then as an award-winning graphic novelist with Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic. Time Magazine named it the Best Book of 2006 and it won a Lambda Literary Award.
This groundbreaking graphic memoir literally and figuratively drew us into Bechdel's dysfunctional family, particularly her relationship with her father, a stern obsessive man who was a high school English teacher and ran a funeral home. It was not until she was in college when she came out as a lesbian, that she discovered her father had been a closeted gay man. After only one conversation between them about their shared gay identity, a few weeks later, he committed suicide.
Bechdel's journal became an international literary sensation—a best-seller that also had people calling for it to be banned in public libraries. This work was game-changing for the genre, as Bechdel disrupted the primarily male and straight pantheon of comic literature with her unabashedly queer sensibility. Her book was virtuosic, ingenious in its visual construction and literary execution, demonstrating that graphic novels were not solely the domains of youth.
Now Bechdel returns with a new graphic work, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, filling in the backstory of her tumultuous family growing up and during the writing of her earlier bittersweet memoir, but now with her mother at center stage. The journey is both poignant and hilarious as Bechdel excavates memories to forge emotional connections with her aloof and distant parent, as their Electra complex is played out and she seeks reconciliation and resolution.
Bechdel looks back and tries to understand, yet distinguish herself from her mother, drawing from photographs, early diary entries, letters, sketches and transcriptions of present-day phone conversations. She has been obsessively journaling her life since she was ten, so there is ample basal material here.
Living with a closeted husband and raising three children took its toll. At age seven, her mother told Bechdel she was too old to be kissed goodnight any longer, and her two brothers were more valued than she. Her emotionally estranged parent was most alive and joyful out of the home, acting in community theater productions.
Non-linear and recursive, scenes shift back and forth in time and are replayed over and over again, from multiple points of view from the girl child, as well as the now adult narrator. Literary references abound. Virginia Woolf's diaries are juxtaposed throughout, as well as psychobabble from Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott and Alice Miller, along with Bechdel's own therapy sessions with analysts.
Her signature drawing style, honed over decades of creating comic strips, is precise, uncluttered, and forthrightly direct—extremely effective in helping to detail emotions and story. Each frame adds nuance and detail, propelling the narrative forward and enhancing the text. It is lovely to see familiar characters from her previous Dykes to Watch Out For chronicles reappear in this memoir, as well as scenes from her father's tale, now portrayed through another perspective lens.
In her inimitable style as graphic alchemist, Bechdel has created another audacious book: insightful, engrossing, entertaining and courageous. Throughout she dares herself to begin and begin again, challenging herself to stop "writing around something." As scenes are revisited, more information is teased out; feelings are ever more intimately exposed.
However, the dialectics in this mother daughter saga are not solely focused on doom and gloom, shame and blame. There is also much hilarity in the illustrated odyssey. Bechdel's first person narrator is continually tripping herself up with anxiety and self-doubting neurosis, complicating many of the situations in her fraught maternal relationship. While the child within may not be sated in the resolving tableaus, Bechdel recognizes her mother did indeed give her "a way out" to become the gifted artist she is today.
