Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon: 'an extraordinarily intimate account of family secrets that manages to be shocking, unsettling and life-affirming at the same time', as Sarah Walters wrote in the Guardian. The Times said it was 'incontestably the graphic book of the year', while the Observer recently chose it as one of the ten best graphic novels ever published.
While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this new memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, 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 psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to one explosively illuminating Dr Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) 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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While engaged in some sort of home-improvement project, I inadvertently block my exit from a dank cellar. 1, THE ORDINARY, DEVOTED MOTHER
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(@vintagebooks, 28 March 2013, ebook, 304 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs, # popsugarreadingchallenge, book in a different format than what you normally read)
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I'm familiar with the author's work as her comic strips appeared in Diva magazine many years ago when I used to read it but I've never read anything full-length. This is a memoir with a difference, a graphic novel. I've read a few graphic novels over the year's but they're not something I'd normally read. I really enjoyed this. Alison explores her relationship with her mother and her father and her own relationships over the years as well as her own identity and insecurities. I found it fascinating. I've never read a memoir in this format before and found it very refreshing. Alison is a fan of psychoanalysis and psychology in general and there is a lot of interesting information about her reading of well-known psychoanalysis's as well as many pages which detail her own sessions with various therapists. Are You My Mother? is very different and refreshing.
