Adult Graphic Memoir

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

The follow up to Bechdel's Fun Home, Are You My Mother? focuses on Bechdel's relationship with her mother, a woman who was raised to believe that boys were more valuable than girls, and who stopped kissing her daughter goodnight at the age of seven. Bechdel combines the work of psychoanalysts with memories of her mother, conversations, and moments from her own therapy sessions. The psychoanalytic passages, and (one is lead to believe) the fact that Bechdel's mother is alive, makes this a denser, more layered book than Fun Home. The reader must wade in and pull apart the many strands of Bechdel's story, piecing together chronology and figuring out terminology. The work is inevitably worth it, and the time spent meditating on the book only increases the reader's emotional experience.