Are You My Mother?

The term "comic book" seems kind of reductive to me. It's been usurped by the more serious-sounding "graphic novel," but Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, borrowing a line from Dr. Seuss, is not a novel, it's a memoir. Following up on her book about her father, Fun Home (which I haven't read) she has turned to her other parent, and crafted something of a masterpiece.

This book, which she calls "A Comic Drama," is a thick stew of many different ingredients. Mostly it's about psychology. Bechdel begins each chapter with one of her dreams, and has extensive depictions of her sessions with two different analysts. She extensively quotes from psychologist Donald Winnicott, who did groundbreaking work on the mother-infant relationship, and the "object relations theory." I don't pretend to understand it all, and I admit I got confused when Bechdel got into the "true self" and the "false self," but nonetheless I was intrigued by her own self-exploration of her relationship with her mother.

Bechdel, who is a lesbian, never has had to consider maternity on her own. She writes: "Sort of how I'd understood human reproduction as a child, I was an egg inside my mother when she was still an egg inside her mother, and so forth and so on. A dizzying, infinite regress. There's a certain relief in knowing that I am a terminus."

Other works cited are Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, which the elder Ms. Bechdel had a part in as an actress. But lest this sound too heavy, it is full of brio, as Bechdel is a constantly engaging narrator. She is also amazingly candid. While changing some names, she deals honestly with her relationships, and is unafraid of dealing squarely with her mother. In one scene she describes, at age seven, when her mother told her she was too old to be kissed good night.

Much of the book is dealing with how her mother is going to deal with the book about her father, and then how she will deal with this book. I'm very impressed--I don't think I could write about my parents. Not while they are alive, anyway.