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Mother of All Memoirs Review: Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama B Y M A R G O T HA R R I S O N
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“A
ll I’ve ever written about is myself,” Bolton cartoonist Alison Bechdel tells Judith Thurman in her April 23 profile in the New Yorker, “and this book, if I finish it, may be the most solipsistic piece of insanity ever published.” That’s quite a blurb. “This book” is Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, the followup to Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It is both selffocused and insane (or, at least, insanely complex), and anyone who makes it through the first few pages will not be able to stop reading. Solipsistic or not, the author has a way of turning her obsessions into ours. Bechdel’s first memoir was about her dead parent. Her second is about her living one — who is, if anything, a tougher subject. Early on, Bechdel depicts herself telling her therapist, “I can’t write this book until I get [my mother] out of my head.” “But,” she continues in the next panel, her hands waving in visible frustration, “the only way to get her out of my head is by writing the book!” That scene epitomizes Are You My Mother?, which draws readers into the vortex of trying to grasp a relationship that is still evolving. It’s a work of remarkable density that, like therapy, often seems to have no proper beginning or end. Had Bechdel told this story in text alone, it might quickly have become as tedious as reading a stranger’s dream journal peppered with erudite quotations.
But her drawings transform convoluted thoughts into anecdotes of power and fleetness. Are You My Mother? is not a book one can or should race through; it is a book that intertwines itself with the reader’s own thoughts, struggles and dreams. Bechdel layered the multiple narratives of Fun Home on a simple, compelling core: A prominent lesbian cartoonist remembers her father, who was a closeted gay man, a mortician and, quite possibly, a suicide. Are You My Mother? is harder to encapsulate. It’s a book about Bechdel’s mother, past and present — including Helen Bechdel’s reactions to the personal revelations