Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.

A New York Times, USA Today, and Time Best Book of the Year

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.

Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother -- to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
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304 pages

Average rating: 6.6

10 RATINGS

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1 REVIEW

Community Reviews

Anonymous
Feb 02, 2023
6/10 stars
I thought this was a lot less thematically coherent than Fun Home but I still really enjoyed it. Bechdel has a real knack for powerful, evocative imagery (both in the literary sense and the artistic one) that kept grounding this book in emotionality when its more abstract elements flew it a bit too close to the sun.

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