I really liked this book, though I didn't give it five stars because I think I need to go back and reread parts of it--it, much like Fun Home, is super dense in places, and this perhaps more so because it's in part about psychiatry and psychotherapy as a practice and parental/child complexes. Bechdel's art is so easy and nice to look at--I mean easy in an aesthetic sense, like she works so hard to make the world so familiar and it pays off tremendously. I also really felt like I was able to follow this book better than I followed Fun Home, despite the content difficulty. At one point, Bechdel writes that her mother calls the manuscript for this book a "meta-book" and that's very much what it is--and in some points, that can be frustrating. I can't imagine the patience of Bechdel's therapists that she falls in love with--I know to some degree the inability to dig deep or to hit a wall in therapy, but the frustration of Bechdel's seeming inability to put the analytical part of her brain aside and allow herself to click with the emotional does shape this book in a lot of ways.

But overall, the catharsis of this book is really beautiful--the points at which Bechdel can forgive herself for her mother's inability to give her everything she needs are really beautiful and touching, and that alone really makes this book worth reading.