Are You My Mother?

Starred review from March 5, 2012
There was a danger inherent in the bestselling microscopically examined autobiography of Bechdel’s Fun Home, namely that further work from this highly impressive artist could disappear so far down the rabbit hole of her own mind that readers might never find their way back out. Her first book since that masterful 2006 chronicle of her closeted father’s suicide narrowly avoids that fate, but is all the stronger for risking it. This Jungian “comic drama” finds Bechdel investigating the quiet combat of another relationship: that of her distant, critical mother and her own tangled, self-defeating psyche. Bechdel’s art has the same tightly observed aura of her earlier work, but with a deepening and loosening of style. The story, which sketches more of the author’s professional and personal life outside of her family, is spiderwebbed with anxiety and self-consciousness (“I was plagued... with a tendency to edit my thoughts before they even took shape”). There’s a doubling-back quality, mixed with therapeutic interludes that avoid self-indulgence and are studded with references to creative mentors like Virginia Woolf (another obsessive who yet took daring creative leaps), analyst Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller. Though perhaps not quite as perfectly composed as Fun Home, this is a fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
With Fun Home (2006), the cartoonist of the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For gave readers a compelling narrative of how she was both formed and misinformed by literature, feminist politics, family dynamics, and her father's visual legacy. She goes well beyond this in her new graphic memoir. The metanarrative follows Bechdel as she researches, writes, and talks about the process of mining and metabolizing the incongruities in her mother's life and the similarities she finds in her own internal processes. Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott, a British child analyst and object-relations theorist, are extensively referenced here, with perfectly elided sequences to aid in understanding how and why Bechdel seeks and finds solace in psychotherapy and analysis; how she and her mother maintain a substantive, though essentially external, relationship; and how the cartoonist relates to her own work. The tension between inner and outer lives is a running motif in both the narrative arc and the imagery. Bechdel's adult insight on how a Dr. Seuss illustration that she loved as a child can be quickly reworked into a mother's womb is just one of many brilliantly realized metaphors. Her lines and angles are sharper than in Fun Home, and yet her self-image and her views of family members, lovers, and analysts are thorough, clear, and kind. Mothers, adult daughters, literati, memoir fans, and psychology readers are among the many who will find this outing a rousing experience. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This may be the most anticipated graphic novel of the year, and the 100,000-copy first printingone of the highest yet for a graphic novelattests to both Bechdel's popularity and the format's vast growth in recent years.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)