Book Review: Are You My Mother?

Title: Are You My Mother?

Author: Alison Bechdel

Rating: ☕ ☕ ☕ (3)

Once again I picked a book based on the number of times it ended up on my shelving cart at work.  Though I am someone who enjoys reading both biographies and graphic novels, I rarely read graphic novel memoirs; not that there are many to choose from, and so I decided to give this one a shot. Admittedly, I hadn’t heard of author Alison Bechdel before I picked up this book, so I didn’t have any preconceived notions about her story telling style. And after reading Are You My Mother? I feel like I would have benefited from reading some of her non-autobiographical comics beforehand. 

The art in this book is wonderful. Bechdel manages to put so much detail into each panel without making it look cluttered or messy. I also love how she uses only gray and red for her color pallet, I felt that the red enhances the storytelling and adds an extra dimension to the relationship between the author and her mother, tying the past and the present together.   

Bechdel’s graphic memoir is an interesting blend of accounts of her memories and conversations with her mother and the dissection of those interactions with the help of her psychoanalyst over the course of many decades. I feel that in addition to the memoir, I was given a crash course in psychoanalysis, a field of study I have very little knowledge of outside of the basic Freudian theories I learned in Psych 100, which I took over 10 years ago. At the core though, is the complex relationship Bechdel has with her mother. The author often tries to explain the hows and whys of her complex feelings through the words of others, most prominently Virginia Woolf and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. 

Aside from the heady background material, I had a hard time relating to Bechdel and her need to pick apart every conversation, every dream, every action, etc.  I grew up in a very average family and I have a wonderfully uncomplicated relationship with my own Mom, so I had a hard time understanding the relationship between Bechdel and her mother. It seems that Bechdel was also puzzled about their relationship, which is probably why she decided to chronicle the journey to define what her mother is to her. By the end of the book, I felt like I learned more about Winnicott and the Mother-Daughter relationship than about her mother.

It took me a little longer to get through this compared to other graphic novels. Most of this was because of the citations from the many books on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. There were times when I had to stop and reread a passage because I wasn’t sure what I had just read. For some, I even looked up the original source material in order to gain some further insight. Overall I enjoyed reading it and gaining insight to Bechdel’s journey to find out what her mother means to her.