![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I’ve given at least a few indications of my enjoyment of Bechdel’s first graphic memoir in my review of its musical offspring Fun Home. The bookend volume Are You My Mother? was, in my mind, an extremely different book and harder to like. (Heck: harder to finish.) While Fun Home was a sometimes painful, sometimes comic revisiting of Bechdel’s life, Are You My Mother? is an illustrated visit to a psychiatrist’s couch. (Literally.)
The material is dense, disjointed, and layered, working through various psychiatric theories (and their human underpinnings), Bechdel’s attempts to come to grips with her own psychological issues relating to family and relationships, and most especially her relationship with her mother, particularly revolving around Bechdel’s artistic career and the impact her first memoir had on that relationship. The layout is massively non-linear, cycling around through various periods of her life (and her mother’s life) in a way that presumes the reader already knows the basic outlines. (This is probably a reasonable assumption.)
This was not a book that I could sit down and read in a single session, or even in several long gulps. I kept reading a couple pages and then putting it down and having a hard time getting back to it. I think it took me over two years to finish it. I’m not saying the book isn’t good. I think it’s an artistic masterpiece. But it isn’t very enjoyable, or perhaps more accurately, it isn’t very entertaining. The expectations set up by the graphic format are at war with the deeply contemplative nature of the content. I would not have read an introspective memoir of this type as a textual book--just not my kind of thing. So I came to it with the wrong frame of mind to truly appreciate it. And so...I dunno. I honestly don’t know what to say about this book. An artist has to go where her muse takes her. Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” strips weren’t exactly “fluff”, there was a lot of hard-hitting cultural commentary there, as well as historical chronicling. I would be personally unhappy if the graphic memoirs signal a permanent change in the direction of her work. But I don’t know that it’s possible to go back to that sort of light-hearted anecdotal strip after working at this level. I guess we’ll see.
The material is dense, disjointed, and layered, working through various psychiatric theories (and their human underpinnings), Bechdel’s attempts to come to grips with her own psychological issues relating to family and relationships, and most especially her relationship with her mother, particularly revolving around Bechdel’s artistic career and the impact her first memoir had on that relationship. The layout is massively non-linear, cycling around through various periods of her life (and her mother’s life) in a way that presumes the reader already knows the basic outlines. (This is probably a reasonable assumption.)
This was not a book that I could sit down and read in a single session, or even in several long gulps. I kept reading a couple pages and then putting it down and having a hard time getting back to it. I think it took me over two years to finish it. I’m not saying the book isn’t good. I think it’s an artistic masterpiece. But it isn’t very enjoyable, or perhaps more accurately, it isn’t very entertaining. The expectations set up by the graphic format are at war with the deeply contemplative nature of the content. I would not have read an introspective memoir of this type as a textual book--just not my kind of thing. So I came to it with the wrong frame of mind to truly appreciate it. And so...I dunno. I honestly don’t know what to say about this book. An artist has to go where her muse takes her. Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” strips weren’t exactly “fluff”, there was a lot of hard-hitting cultural commentary there, as well as historical chronicling. I would be personally unhappy if the graphic memoirs signal a permanent change in the direction of her work. But I don’t know that it’s possible to go back to that sort of light-hearted anecdotal strip after working at this level. I guess we’ll see.
