I picked up DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR on a whim, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to explore Bechdel's other works. ARE YOU MY MOTHER? was quite the tailspin.

One of the reasons I adored DYKES and FUN HOME was because of rigorous thought and academic intelligensia behind them: the personal twined with the political; the old myths twined with Bechdel's family life. In MOTHER, Bechdel lays a blanket of psychoanalysis & child development theory over her relationship with her mother, with Dr. Donald Winnicott's theories taking centerpoint. This intersection of psychoanalysis/child development theory and Bechdel's mother Helen is so tightly woven that the chapters are organized by dreams, which Bechdel spends the chapter free-associating and analyzing in a swirling vortex of memory and fiction.

I confess I had to re-read sections, or only read the overarching narrative and go back to read the comic characters' speak bubbles. A whole lot happens at once, and Bechdel skips all over her personal timeline to connect abstract feeling to abstract thought. It didn't help that I'm only familiar with Freud's psychoanalysis method and works, so Bechdel was driving through new territory for me. Almost needless to say, MOTHER was not a good book to read while sipping summer martinis, which I may or may not have been doing while reading it.

After finishing the book (and the martinis), I felt poetically enlightened, but concretely confounded. I had the distinct impression that Bechdel had reached a point of peace with her mother, had recognized her flaws, and forgiven her for them. However, without a lot of diagraming and careful re-reading, I couldn't tell you how I arrived at this impression. It's sort of like, after a lovely dream, you feel peaceful when you awake, but can't place why you're in a peaceful mood because you've forgotten the dream.

All and all, I know instinctively that ARE YOU MY MOTHER? is an important, feminist work and perfect for the classroom. On the other hand, I'm frustrated that the "plot" of the memoir is a mess, that there are no straightforward answers, that sometimes the psychoanalysis sounds like psycho-babble navel-gazing, and that Helen as a person is just as mysterious as at the beginning as the end. I agree with other reviews that Winnicott's work was a less accessible lens to look through than FUN HOME's classic literature. With MOTHER, the lens had fly in the ointment, or the blanket forming a stranglehold if we go back to that metaphor.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? is a book to pay attention to, to take a class about, to pick apart and re-read over and over and over again. I wish everyone, especially the casual reader, best of luck.