3.
Title: [Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama]
Author: Alison Bechdel
Genre: Autobiography
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: Library book
Date Completed: January 12, 2016
Rating: ****

Alison Bechdel is a compelling American comic artist known for her strip "Dykes to Watch Out For", and whose 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, describing her relationship with her father before his suicide, was produced as a wonderfully successful Broadway musical in 2013. The show has won fifteen awards to date, including five Tony awards in 2015. The complexity and spirit of Fun Home is moving and engaging, drawing a parallel course between the author's own coming out as a lesbian and her closeted father's attempts to pass and remain buried in one of the ornate closets of his painstakingly-restored Victorian house. There's a tension in Bechdel's writing, given the highly personal content of her work, and an awareness of the potential conflict which will arise when she succinctly outs her father, whose life is successfully secreted until her book.  There's much to say, but not here, because this is a review of her second parental examination, and not a return to Bechdel's father.

Are You My Mother? claims to be the companion of Bechdel's earlier memoir, illuminating her mother where she once examined her father.  Frequently claims to be, I'll emphasize, as Bechdel repeatedly reminds the reader that she is writing this "book about [her] mother," and even finishes the text with her mother claiming subjectivity.  This constant reminder is required, though, because the book is not truly about Bechdel's mother - indeed, she is physically and subjectively absent for much of the story, perhaps reflecting her ornamental role in the false narrative of her deceased husband. What Bechdel shares of her mother is both a repetition of what is shared in Fun Home, and almost completely overshadowed by Bechdel's psychoanalytic readings of why her relationship with her mother is so emotionally difficult for the comic.  The book isn't about Bechdel's mother - it's about Bechdel herself, and her attempts to find a spiritual mother, to come to terms with her decision to not be a mother, to make peace with her sense of failing in the eyes of her mother. It begs for approval much like Bechdel herself seeks her mother's approval, but it makes no space for the purported subject of her narrative - her mother is influential, but peripheral. The psychoanalytic saturation of the content is burdensome, distracting from the humanity of the story, and distancing the text from the actual relationships - a distance that I think Bechdel may feel she needs, whether or not she does this purposefully. Whereas the house of Fun Home stands as a foreboding and constant symbol of Bechdel's father, whose stoic face is nearly constantly present, the dominant image of Are You My Mother? is Bechdel's own profile as she seeks reassurance from other women in her life - most frequently her therapists, but also her mother, heard most often over the phone. The pages are saturated in an eerie orange-red, the tangee lipstick of her mother forecasting the turmoil and aggressive potential of the story, the color rendering even the most ordinary of scenes slightly ominous.  Though Bechdel's father is described as having the temper in her childhood home, her mother's red suggests she is a far greater threat to the developing artist, and literally and figuratively colors each of their interactions, succinctly marking them as aggressive and hostile.

So why four stars? I enjoy reading about Bechdel as much as I would have enjoyed actually reading about her mother, and found the book engaging and entertaining, even with its endless citations of Virginia Woolf and Winicott. This may not be for everyone, but it was still for me, and I'm looking forward to going into the details in the not-too-distant future.