Are You My Mother Alison Bechdel Pdf Download
Jocelin Taylor
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a 2012 graphic memoir written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel, about her relationship with her mother. The book is a companion piece to her earlier work Fun Home, which deals with her relationship with her father. The book interweaves memoir with psychoanalysis and exploration of various literary works, particularly Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
Are You My Mother? is composed of seven chapters, each introduced by a description of a dream that Bechdel had. The dream is then interpreted and explained in the context of various events in Bechdel's life, jumping backwards and forwards in time in doing so. The book covers events that occurred before she was born all the way up to the process of editing Are You My Mother? itself. The book is Bechdel's attempt to come to grips with her relationship with her mother, an unaffectionate amateur actor trapped in a marriage to a closeted homosexual. In exploring her mother's lack of warmth, Bechdel supplements her own recollections with insights from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, particularly with reference to his notion of the true self and the false self and his theory on transitional objects. While various scenes depicting visits to psychologists later in life make it clear that Bechdel's childhood left a troubling mark on her adult life, the book ends on an uplifting note, concluding with the lines, "There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. But in its place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. She has given me the way out."[2]
But as the twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott writes in The Ordinary Devoted Mother, "at three or four months after being born, the baby may be able to show that he or she knows what it is like to be a mother." Furthermore, after giving birth, "the woman enters into a phase ... in which to a large extent she is the baby and the baby is her." This confusing situation isn't supposed to last. Bechdel, who gives each of her chapters the name of a Winnicottian concept, writes about the transitional object: that thing, like Pooh-Bear, that's "not me, but not not-me either," which allows us to move away from our moms. Eventually, we are supposed to leave that transitional thing behind, too.
"There is nothing mystical about this," Winnicott writes of the mother-child bond. Bechdel, who disagrees, superimposes this fragment of text over a full-page drawing showing a series of photographs of herself, as a three-month-old, and her mom. Bechdel's drawings of the photos, scattered over a desk covered in pens, protractors, and an accidentally perfect jar of baby food, are done in the more realistic, cross-hatched style she reserves for the many artifacts that enter her work. The depth created by the drawing's layered realism is mirrored by the text: a hand-drawn replica of the Winnicott quote; narration, in a series of rectangles; Bechdel's off-stage voice; and her mother's voice from the phone. "Mom is making faces and presumably sounds at me," the captions read. "In each shot, I reflect her expression and the shape of her mouth with uncanny precision."
Mom didn't think she'd read Winnicott, though the term "good enough mother" rang some bells. This was Winnicott's designation for the mother who doesn't satisfy all of a baby's needs, leading the child to compensate by developing a mind that can provide it with what the mother would not. Bechdel remembers skidding on her knees across the lawn, imagining her mother watching her "like a mother in a detergent commercial, sighing with loving exasperation at the grass stains that would require her care."
The simultaneous commentary and action is just dissociated enough to produce the effects of metaphor. Bechdel's introduction of outside sources and almost slavish devotion to detail allow meaning to layer over her scenes. The arrangement of panels, captions, and speech bubbles brings at least one more dimension to her two-dimensional art. "Do you love me?" asks the mother of a young, pajama-ed Alison standing downcast beside her. "I instantly knew that all I wanted was to assure her that I loved her," the caption reads, while behind the mother's head Old Jolyon Forsyte adjures: "You have duties, responsibilities!"
Bechdel's sprawling, searching book is an attempt to make sense of her relationship with her mother, a brilliant, sometimes unreachable woman who stopped kissing her only daughter goodnight at age 7. (It takes its title from P.D. Eastman's 1960 children's book about a little, lost bird.) It is an intensely personal, specific story, but Bechdel's imaginative narrative techniques make it easily as compelling as any fiction.
One of the book's most visually arresting frames is a full-page infographic illustrating Winnicott's "object relations theory," the idea that an infant is merely the sum reflection of its caretakers. In Bechdel's case, those caretakers were her mother, longtime therapists Jocelyn and Carol, and her ex-girlfriends Eloise, Donna, Diane, Amy, and Holly. Their faces smile up from their respective spots on a bar graph, their influence and love scientifically quantified.
Still, it's Helen Bechdel's mothering that's put on display here, just a few years after having her marriage and the death of her husband similarly opened to public view by her daughter. Her unease about the project seems to stem more from a distaste for the genre of memoir than the invasion of privacy: "The self has no place in good writing," she tells Bechdel at one point. "Wallace Stevens wrote transcendent poetry, and he never used the word I."
There are other gestures of love: Her mother sent Bechdel money while she struggled to make a living from her comic strip, even though she thought the endeavor would limit her daughter's career. They talk every week, even if she avoids asking about her daughter's personal life. ("She's afraid if I get a word in edgewise, it'll be 'cunnilingus,'" Bechdel complains to her therapist.) She hands over old love letters between herself and her dead husband, telling her daughter to use whatever she wants for her book.
There is no dramatic redemption at the end of Are You My Mother?, perhaps because the book is not a parade of tortured secrets or a juicy accusation of lousy parenting. Ultimately, it's a peace offering from one flawed woman to another. "My mother composed me as I now compose her," Bechdel reflects as she types throughout another phone call. "The running tap of her life flows through my fingers." Though the book is the narrowly drawn truth of two particular lives, the characters' search for connection and identity has as much resonance as any novel.
Bechdel notes at the book's beginning that she will never be a mother herself; she began menopause the week she began drawing the story. "There's a certain relief in knowing that I am a terminus," she writes. Instead, this work is her link in the long chain connecting her foremothers and their daughters and all of the other women who shaped her.
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Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.
Named best book of the year by Time magazine in 2006, Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her distant, closeted gay father. This time, Bechdel's subject is her mother, a passionate lover of books, art, and music who showed her daughter little affection. As Bechdel works her way through her own life, she eventually works her way back to her mother. With a big national tour.
Your mother was a wonderful teacher. She was also extremely kind and encouraging to me during the time I was a student at BHS and beyond that point, when I was in college. While I never officially came out to her, whenever I would visit with her post-high school, she always spoke very highly of you; it was obvious that she was very proud of you. (In fact, she once showed me a videotaped interview you did with, I believe, some PBS station in the midwest!)
I just read are you my mother in one sitting,the. Decided Check out your blog. I was enthralled with the honesty, forgiveness and reconciliation of the story . It echoes my own relationship with my mother and the story is both uncomfortable and hopeful to me. I know it was hard won.
From how you decruve her, i believe your mam understood and appreciated te transformative powers of art, for provocation, discussion and healing. Therefore she must have been very proud and pleased about your accomplishments. To discover your mother had died recently moved me, please accept my condolences, best wishes and thanks for your candid book. Very best wishes , Hx