The Beyond Busy Global Book Club discusses this book from June 4th – June 10th 2012, Join the discussion any time!Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.
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Yesterday I had a bone to pick with Alison Bechdel. Today, I want to sing her praises. Want to help me?
Here is a short list of things I really found delightful about the book:
The cover: awesome! Love how it’s the companion to the earlier Fun Home cover.
The artwork, by Bechdel herself, is amazing. I mean think about it all you writers out there: not only does Bechdel write these books, she illustrates every single pane too. Incredible!
The images of Bechdel herself. For some reason I am really taken with the way Bechdel portrays herself artistically in Are You My Mother? I thought she did a really fine job. It seems to me that the sheer variety of images would have been daunting to any artist.
The universal moments in the book that often exist between mothers and daughters, or at least that I could relate to, like her mother’s makeup table, the difficulty of witnessing her mother’s strong emotion, painful moments for her between the two of them, and the constant comparison and contrast of mother vs. daughter, whether it was coming from Alison’s point of view or her mothers.
I liked how this was so clearly a story about an individual mother and an individual daughter, and yet how specific their stories were, while at the same time there were so many universal stories being played out between them.
What did you think?
While you are thinking, be sure to purchase Fun Home to read when you can!
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I liked it more as I became accustomed to her style. I doubt if many of us have created a new, unheard of mother daughter experience. Most of us experience similar events colored by our own unique personalities, making them special to us – and perhaps strange to others. The interesting mother/daughter relationships portrayed in a comic book format caused me to slow down, to pay more attention to what she is saying. Writers who force me to see things from a new perspective, to learn from another person’s story, can only have a positive impact on me.
I was amazed at the illustrations. No wonder such a book would take years to complete.