Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama - Paperback

by Alison Bechdel (Author)

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.

A New York Times, USA Today, and Time Best Book of the Year

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: voracious reader, music lover, 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.

Back Jacket

A "New York Times," "USA Today," "Time," "Slate," and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year

Complex, funny, and ultimately affirming, the book is another masterpiece of graphic storytelling. "Boston Globe"

In this brilliantly told graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning her complex relationship with her mother a voracious reader and passionate amateur actor, a woman whose creative aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel s childhood.

As Bechdel grapples with having become the artist her mother wanted to be, she takes readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to her own adult love life. Ultimately, though, she comes back to Mother and their fragile, poignant truce.

Magnificent . . . Bechdel s triumph is not just that she s emerged from her tunnel, with weary but clear eyes, but that she s brought her mother with her. "Entertainment Weekly
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Author Biography

Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors. Her new memoir, The Secret to Superman Strength, is forthcoming in 2021.