Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (original 2012; edition 2012)

Sat up reading this from 11:30 at night until 1:40 in the morning. So compelling I can't even really talk about it yet.

****

On reflection:
I was too affected by this book to talk directly about why it meant so much to me, but here's a thing I noticed: In Fun Home, the images are often very object-oriented (you frequently see what the character is looking at), while the words carry the lion's share of emotion and meaning. That still happens in this book, but more often the words are either distanced themselves, or so rawly honest that they create distance in the reader, while Bechdel's images of the characters' faces and bodies carry their feelings and even the story arc. (It's both/and in both cases, but the balance is different.) This approach dovetails with the ideas in some of the theoretical texts she chose to include, about people cutting themselves off from their bodies and living in an analytical mind, and about false selves, so I suspect it was a purposeful choice. Perhaps some of the negative reviewers relied too much on the text and didn't spend enough time with the pictures?

In any case, I thought it was absolutely a brilliant book; I will be revisiting it later this summer, when I can spend more time scrutinizing each panel without being so swept up.
( )

It is very good, but not as striking as Bechdel's earlier big book, [b:Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic|7351680|Fun Home A Family Tragicomic|Alison Bechdel|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nocover/60x80.png|911368]. That's partly because I read Fun Home in a different context - I knew the fabulous Dykes to Watch Out For strip but not much about Bechdel herself, her background and her family - I was a fan of her work without the detail to call myself a fangirl. This second memoir reveals less about its author, in many ways, despite the delving into psychoanalysis, the love history, and the dream sequences.

Frankly the psychoanalysis, therapy, and dream analysis bits put me off (YMMV). As far as I'm concerned, it's all unscientific nonsense, and I was sorry to see Bechdel approvingly quote bits about "erroneously carried out actions" (sort of physical freudian slips, or as I reckon they are, chance mishaps that then get an explanatory narrative attached to them). Clearly she gets a lot out of these explanations, and it's interesting to see that from the point of view of being an interested reader of her other work - how does she come to create her other work? what hang-ups and difficulties does she have about that creative work, and how does she get through them?

But... I'd rather read some new Dykes to Watch Out For, and she's basically never going to do that again now. ( )

Wow. I am having a hard time believing how much I disliked this book. The two stars are for the drawings, not the text. I found it recursive, uninteresting- no, stultifying, masturbatory and at heart fairly hollow. There are pages and pages of transcriptions from the writings of eminent Freudians, pages of Bechdel's therapy, and pages of the dreams of both Bechdel and eminent Freudians. Perhaps my own psychoanalysis would be interesting to me (though I doubt it)- someone else's surely is not.

Despite the claustrophobic focus on Bechdel and her anxieties, there's a curious distance here that fed my boredom and made turning every page a struggle. It's ostensibly a memoir of her relationship with her mother, but I don't think this worked out very well. It might be just too hard to get the proper distance when the subject of one's retrospective is still alive and opining on one's work.

I am a huge fan of Dykes to Watch Out For and I loved [b:Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic|38990|Fun Home A Family Tragicomic|Alison Bechdel|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327652831s/38990.jpg|911368] with all my heart. This one didn't work for me. Not even a little. ( )

I wasn't quite as fond of this as Fun Home but it still packed a punch that hit me right in the gut. Bechdel is a genius at sentimentality. And I mean that in a good way. ( )

Knocked it out in one night. So good. ( )