Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery—this time about her mother: a voracious reader, music lover, and passionate amateur actor, also a woman unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own serially monogamous adult love life. And finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

A brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.