Book: Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel
Reviewed by: Steven
Alison Bechdel melts my brain. Her initial notoriety stemming from her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (beautifully bound and anthologized in 2008’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For), Bechdel incinerated the graphic autobiography genre in 2006 with Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which details her realization, acceptance, and celebration of her homosexuality while describing her tumultuous relationship with her father and his inability to accept his own bisexuality, all in the wake of his questionable suicide. The literary achievement of this revelatory work cannot be overstated, but it will, fortunately for fans of Bechdel, have to share the title of “greatest and most powerful illustrated memoir” with this year’s Are You My Mother?.
In her new graphic masterpiece, Alison Bechdel explores her strained relationship with her mother through a simultaneous biography of a psychoanalytic innovator, a treatise on object relations theory, and a meta-account of the psychological hurdles she had to overcome to write her first book, as well as their ongoing implications for her next. She gracefully balances the considerable academic necessities inherent in research and self-analysis with the comic manifestations of her neuroses in her relationships and daily life. Her hypnotic symbolism, far from being heavy-handed, is incredibly vivid and profound. The elaborate and sophisticated plot of the work is tied together by Bechdel’s elegant and exacting artwork. Colorless with the exception of telling patches of rouge shimmering through the grey, no line is wasted, and each panel is pregnant with meaning. Are You My Mother? is a poignant rhapsody that spotlights the failures, complications, and triumphs of every relationship and savors the near-impossibility of the act of motherhood.
BookPeople 
Very persuasive.