Well. As an artist who grew up in a museum, as the daughter of a complicated and creative mother (hi, Mom!), and as a skeptical analysand, I found MUCH that spoke to me about Are You My Mother?. But I have a strong bias against works of art that are about how difficult it is to make works of art, so I can't wholeheartedly endorse this as I could (her previous graphic-novel-memoir) Fun Home.

...Upon further reflection, I have to add that I am in awe of Alison Bechdel's bravery. I spent no fewer th More...

I was a big fan of Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” when it came out 6 years ago, it was an interesting and insightful memoir about her growing up in a funeral home with a father who was secretly homosexual and would later commit suicide, and then discovering that she was gay as well. It was an excellent book that I would recommend to all comics fans but also readers in general, so I was looking forward to this follow-up, this time the focus supposedly being on her mother. What more revelations could More...

ETA i'm reading around in GR, checking other reviews of this book, and there are SO MANY that are SO GOOD and make points that are different from mine, or points that are similar to mine but say it better. great literature produces great responses!

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this is the best memoir i have read. in fact, it is one of the best books i've ever read period. i tried to think of other books that would compare to it in beauty, creativity, intelligence, complexity, and depth, and i think i'm going to More...

A self-consciously forced "meta-book" follow-up to Fun Home. Another in the growing list of books about writers trying and mostly failing to write books. Didn't really "cohere" for me. Instead of a literary side-commentary complement to the story of her father, in this she spins psych nuggets to assay her mah, although it's not really about her mother of course, and what's dredged up isn't juicy enough to activate voyeuristic impluses? "Never again psychology!" Kafka shouts in one of his diaries More...

Very introspective, even for a memoir. More about Alison's therapy sessions than about her relationship with her mother. I found myself more curious about her relationship with her father, which seemed traumatic and was mentioned quite a few times but not explored, but reviews of this book indicate that Alison wrote out that relationship in an earlier book.

Quite honestly I thought Alison whined a lot, which I know is an unfair statement to make. So much of the book is focused on her detailed the More...

I started reading this at Mac's Backs, also skipped around, and read it later after the Dotter humored my desire that it be a gift from her.

The reviews are intriguing- so much resistance and dismay at how different this is from the first volume of her memoirs. I don't feel the same impatience or disappointment- it didn't surprise me at all that the volume about her father was warmer and had a more compelling narrative form- her father was warm and his life is over.
Yes i finally know what meta me More...

To me, this book resembles the kind of modernism that forms, in the persona of Virginia Woolf, one of its central themes. It is like nothing so much as a densely contrapuntal twelve-tone composition. Fragments of themes weave in and out of each other, breaking off, reappearing in new contexts; the words and images often come apart, reproducing the sense of polyphony in the written medium. It is a formal tour de force.

The content is intensely interesting, functioning at both an emotional and a ce More...

This, unfortunately, is a disappointment. I suppose, when an author virtually invents a genre, lands on the bestseller list, and wins multiple awards, as Bechdel did with her "graphic memoir" Fun Home, she's set the bar pretty high. So perhaps it's not surprising that her "follow-up" book doesn't rate as well. The production values give this book "star treatment"--a foil stamp cover and a two-color interior (as with Fun Home)--indicating the publisher's expectations. As a tip to editors: when th More...

Alison Bechdel is a brilliant social observer and comics artist, and a lesbian icon. But I was disappointed by this tortured memoir about her relationship with her intellectual and withholding mother. I really wanted to like it, pushed myself three-quarters of the way through, and then stopped trying. It's probably a book Bechdel needed to write after Fun Home, her previous memoir of her thorny relationship with her closeted bisexual father. And there is no denying that both books are extremely More...

Read for J&C basically the moment it came out. Floored but not decimated like I was with Fun Home. One day my life will slow down and I will have something more intelligent to say.

At least she is finally getting the attention she deserves. More...

I love the title of this book. First, because it evokes (thematically) a book of the same name that I loved as a kid. (We had the English-Spanish version, which made it even more fun.) Second, because it fits this book in more than one way, as the question can be asked with different intonations.

And while that children's book isn't mentioned in the text, A.A. Milne's The World of Pooh and Dr. Seuss's The Sleep Book are, and to great revelatory effect, esp with Bechdel's illustrations at these ju More...

I'm a huge fan of Bechdel's previous graphic memoir, FUN HOME, which centers around her closeted father and the ornate family house where Bechdel grew up. I've read it several times, always moved and impressed by its narrative and visual power, and always finding new angles of interest with each reread. Her new graphic memoir, ARE YOU MY MOTHER?, ostensibly centers around her mother this go-around. And while it's brilliantly drawn and certainly an impressive psychological and intellectual achiev More...

Once more Alison Bechdel knocks a stellar work out the park (after half a decade of torturous self-analysis) and repositions the suffering neurotic artist at the forefront of serious art. By turns frustrating and self-absorbed to such mindboggling depths of solipsistic screwdriver-in-the-head nuttiness, the novel slowly reveals itself as a complex rendition of mother-daughter psychodynamics, touching upon Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and pioneering feminist psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott along More...

This book is deep. I think if one were to actually step inside Alison Bechdel's mind for any length of time your path would be littered with steep, spiky stones and your feet would be constantly mired in quicksand.

Somehow much more complex and sorrowful than her previous memoir "Fun Home" which focused on Bechdel's relationship with her bi-sexual father who committed suicide in his early forties "Are You My Mother" attempts to chart a course through the author's tenuous, co-dependent relationsh More...

She did it again! At first I wasn't sure--I just really have an aversion to Woolf. Then the lit focus was less Woolf-heavy and the realness was so real again and the pacing and arrangement were masterful and the illustrations were intense and perfect and I felt a cry feeling at the very end. I didn't cry, though. Fun Home wins on that one.


Earlier: So happy to have this companion to Fun Home in my chubby little hands!

If you don't have a hard-on for psychoanalysis, this meta-book is not for you. It's not for me; I know that now. I learned more about Freud, Winnicott, and Virginia Woolf than about the author, which is weird because at the same time reading this book is like being stuck in her mind during a binge of especially boring thoughts. The book looks pretty. I like the coloring. That's really the only compliment I can give it. If you liked this book, tell me why. I'm legitimately curious because I suspe More...

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 distanc More...

Fans of Fun Home may be disappointed by this sequel, fans of Dykes to Watch Out For may be disappointed, fans of memoir may be disappointed, but no one who has/had a narcissistic mother will be disappointed. Bechdel is the best, bravest, most honest lesbian writer working today, and this book is brilliant.

It took me a while to really get into this one: it's much more slippery than Fun Home in its structure, themes and concerns. The "meta" aspect bothered me initially as it starts out talking about Bechdel's difficulties with writer's block and fears about the reaction of her mother to Fun Home. But once the various threads get going, the complex musical play of ideas and themes is very rewarding: her mother then and now, often as an acerbic voice on the phone (a "voice-over" that counterpoints Be More...

I LOVE this book. In the brief 4 days I've owned it, I've felt like a more open person, and yes, like a better mother. This is what the best literature and art does for us: transforms and inspires us.
I want more Bechdel.

I actually read this book twice in a short period of time after buying it. The first time I read it in one sitting - actually sitting in bed recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning. My brain was a bit slushy and the book felt like it was almost purposefully messing with me - multiple passages about symbolic dreams and the author repeatedly referencing a nearly lifelong fear of vomiting were not the best things for me in that state of mind/body. But I did find myself very consumed by the b More...

I'm pissed off with Alison Bechdel. So much of this was pertinent to my experiences and stuff that I'd already realised and/or discussed with others without all the elitist bourgeois language and references. Like, I have SO MUCH CLASS PRIVILEGE as someone with a middle class background - I have a fucking degree from a redbrick university which, while not in psychology, did expose me a lot to some "seminal" psychological texts and even more to their authors' stale pale male peers and the way thes More...

[if you're not interested in psychotherapy, forget about this book]

Early in the book, Bechdel quotes Virginia Woolf saying: “…but then I should have to speak of the soul & did I not banish the soul when I began?”, moving on to comparing Woolf’s dismissal of the soul to her mother’s perception of her journal: a mere to-do list. Isn’t this exactly what Bechdel does here though? Her dry, humorless, matter-of-fact writing blocks any emotion from the reader and the same distance that exists betwe More...

I don't know how to write this review.


See how annoying that is?? Be glad I didn't take up several paragraphs repeating it.

Honestly, though, I'm just not sure what to say. I kept waiting for Alison Bechdel's second book to get beyond its initial self-consciousness and deliver the story that sounded so promising. Instead, the writer's endless self-reflection winds up being the story itself, with the alleged protagonist relegated to a supporting role. Which is too bad, because the glimpses we see a More...

I love Bechdel, and I love her commitment to the graphic memoir. Are You My Mother manages to feel much more personal than Fun Home did. She removes so much of the arm's distance she used (to great effect) in that book and really wallows in herself here.

I can see how other readers (probably including Bechdel's own featured Mother) might might find that kind of self examination dull to read - but I thought it was fascinating. It also manages to feel much more honest than most of the memoirs comi More...

this is not a real review, because that is still to come. but i've been reading various reviews about boo-hoo, this book is HARD, and I'd like to share what Jeanette Winterson said in response to the fact that people find Art and Lies difficult:

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who mak

More...

I wept a little as I read the first third of this book. I'd hesitantly started reading it, wary that it wouldn't live up to my grand expectations (my favourite authors have been letting me down lately). So when it hit the mark, it hit hard. I could relate to this book, which for me, because I'm a closet narcissist or something is terribly important. There were similarities between Bechdel's mother and mine that I recognised immediately, and funnily - those similarities became even more apparent More...

I finished "Fun Home" about a month ago and eagerly looked forward to the next installment of Alison Bechdel's memoirs. I could not have been more disappointed. The harshest criticism I can give is that it's just plain boring, filled with page after page of psychological pseudo-analysis and "remembered" dreams. I'm sure this book was cathartic for her to write, but it was not the least bit enjoyable to read.