Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

A Comic Drama

Good, 4 stars

From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.

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.

Details

ISBN9780618982509
Copyright Date2012
Publication DateMay 1, 2012
PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
FormatHardcover
No. of Pages224
LanguageEnglish
NotesLambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
RatingGood
GenreAutobiography/Biography; Graphic Novel
SubjectArt