11. Are You My Mother?

By Alison Bechdel

This is the sequel and companion piece to Fun Home, which I was quite impressed by.  Are You My Mother? explores the author’s difficult relationship with her mother, who was no less interesting than her father.  Although her mother was not burdened with the ‘dark secret’ of closeted homosexuality, she was burdened with depression and maternal ambivalence.

Fun Home was more like a graphic memoir while AYMM was more like a therapy memoir, probably because Bechdel’s mother read many books about psychoanalysis and underwent years of therapy.  As a result, AYMM lacked the narrative cohesion and tighter structure of Fun Home, often meandering into self-indulgent tangents and psycho-babble.   

One example was how young Alison and her brothers used to compete for goodnight cuddles and kisses from their mom, and that all abruptly stopped one night when she was seven years old with only a “you’re too old” as an explanation. There is one sentence that simply said there was not enough of her mother to go around.  As a reader, I felt I had to infer what that might have meant to Bechdel as a child and how that shaped her personality as a grown up.  Also she doesn’t even explore what that could have meant for her brothers.  In fact, there were times I forgot she even had brothers, so I’m left with a very narcissistic point of view.

I get the feeling that a child’s memories of a distant parent can be incomplete; usually all that is left are unresolved feelings of hurt and loss.  I think this is why Bechdel replaced these gaps with digressions from Woolf or psychoanalytic quotes, which I suppose was better than supplementing missing memories with false ones. 

Our friend was certainly not impressed with AYMM when he passed on his copy to Olman and I and told us we can keep it.  Even Olman neglected to review it in his blog.

Yet despite all the flaws, I still got a lot out of this book.  I'm very interested in maternal ambivalence and how it manifests in a woman’s relationship with her children, especially during the post-WW2 era when many women questioned their traditional roles and purpose in society. Even today, exploring the negative side of motherhood is still considered an uncomfortable subject, even though it is no longer a social taboo.  I admire Bechdel’s courage in sharing her intimate reflections on her upbringing, and for putting her memories, thoughts, feelings and obsessions on paper in such a uniquely beautiful way.