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alivemagdolene) wrote2012-07-01 07:47 am
alivemagdolene) wrote2012-07-01 07:47 am
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Book-It 'o12! Book #20
The Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one, two, and three just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
Details: Copyright 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
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."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd read Fun Home and been impressed by its art (I'd previously been kinda "meh" about Bechdel; her work was one more in a sea of "edgy" '90s cartoons I'd consumed as a kid). I was excited (if trepidatious; I know how these things can work out) that she had another memoir coming out.
How I Liked It: Are You My Mother? begins with Bechdel rehearsing how she's going to break it to her mother that she wants to write a book about her father. Actually, it begins (like all chapters of the book) with a dream Bechdel has (that she then analyzes) that's relevant to that particular chapter. I was slightly antsy about this being a book about Bechdel writing a book. Nothing necessarily wrong with that in principle, but it can too easily be utterly boring to read.
Other authors have included some navel-gazing in their memoirs, particularly of the graphic novel variety. Before I'd read this book (and I've read a lot of graphic novel memoirs), Art Spiegelman's Maus (both volumes) had contained the most "writing-about-writing-this-book" material. I found this pardonable since A), if he didn't invent the graphic novel memoir, he certain pioneered it as well as graphic novels as a whole (and since the medium was fledgling to non-existent at the time of his writing, some puzzling out of his place was only natural) and B, overall, his reflecting on the work itself was not the primary story. This is perhaps in part a personal preference. Writing about writing the book you are writing (and having that be your focal point) seems incredibly lazy to me and mainly only worthwhile in getting out of writer's block. Part of the reason I could never get into Harvey Pekar's American Splendor was that too damn much of it (that I'd read, anyhow) was based on how he was talking to the illustrator or to himself to talk to the illustrator about the particular comic in which he was appearing. There comes a point where, to me, a story just ceases to exist if it's looking at itself; the whole thing is just too self-conscious. (Incidentally, I omit Pekar's Splendor from the memoir category since I felt it was based far more on his present life day to day rather than his memories of the past.)
Mother is presented, more or less, as the counterpart to Fun Home, this time telling the story of Bechdel's relationship with her mother rather than her father. It's hard not to get the feeling from the packaging that an advertising exec from the publisher resisted the urge to have some variant of "You've read about her father, now read about her mother!" on the cover.
But Mother isn't really about Bechdel's mother, which is the problem. Her relationship with her mother isn't so much about her relationship with her mother as her relationship with her mother in regards to Bechdel's last book. Too often, Mother seems like a "The Making of Fun Home". Too much of her revelations about her mother are not based in the seeming "b-plots", the stories of her interaction and relationship of her mother through the years, they're based in writing Fun Home. Could a great deal of revelation about her mother come through the creation of that memoir which thus fueled this book? Certainly. But it feels like that impetus should be left on the cutting room floor and the reader should be skipped straight to Bechdel's epiphanies rather than, say, the epiphany she had when reading through her father's old letters in research for Fun Home.
Even if this book settled openly on Bechdel's relationship with her mother in light of the revelations brought to light by Bechdel's process through her last book, it wouldn't necessarily have the "navel-gazing/page-fill" that Mother so often has. After all, her creation of the memoir has undeniably passed and she's drawing on past events. But Bechdel also covers her process for this book, including what almost read like diary entries on what she has so far. It feels almost as though Bechdel is stalling for page space.
Her "as I'm writing the book you're currently reading" isn't the only seeming page-fill. Bechdel bloats the book with chunks of quotes (reproduced in their original text form from the books they derive) from Donald Winnicott with pertinent sections actually highlighted. This also serves to all-too-frequently tie up the narrative with circular-thinking psychobabble that feels as though Bechdel is dancing around the real issues at hand. Too many stories/angles that would better serve the book are left unexplored. Bechdel's impulse as a seven-year-old to draw a sexually explicit cartoon (a doctor intimately examines a little girl and Bechdel captions it with "Doctor Cleaning a Little Girl's Tee-Tee Place") and her mother's subsequent discovery of the cartoon and Bechdel's adult connection between that moment and her mother's abrupt conclusion the next day that Bechdel is "too old to be kissed goodnight anymore" is worth more consideration, particularly into her mother's motives (and thus character). Dichotomy such as her mother's comfort with teaching Bechdel and her two younger brothers the proper names of male genitalia during a nightly bath (presumably before the cartoon incident) but discomfort when Bechdel then asks for the proper term for her own (her mother fends her off with "I'll find out what it is and tell you later.") warrants further examination. Her mother's frequent assertions of her equality to her husband (after one such fight, she makes a point of clarifying to a child Bechdel that she and Bechdel's father are equals) yet apparent hatred of the concept of reproductive choice (she breaks her lifelong staid apolitical stance to participate in a demonstration on the fourth anniversary of Roe V. Wade) is another such interesting dichotomy. The fact there's a narrative suggestion that Bechdel's father may have attempted to persuade her mother to have an abortion on at least one pregnancy (Bechdel's mother was already a few months pregnant when they married, another area worth exploring: to what extent did they marry because they felt they had to do so?) is an intriguing angle that Bechdel never pursues.
So oddly, it's not so much that Bechdel focuses too much on herself and her process in the narrative, it's the fact she focuses too much on herself in the wrong places. When there's an anecdote that would not only benefit the storyline but benefit from further exploration, Bechdel resorts to the general, filling panels with quotes from Winnicott (and Bechdel's own often incomprehensible translation of them) and anecdotes and asides from his life, rather than her own. It's not Winnicott's views on the mother's concept of separateness from her child that deserves page after page, it's Bechdel's own mother's views that bear exploring.
The book also doesn't have enough room (possibly due to aforementioned misplaced focus) to properly flesh out (and differentiate) Bechdel's relationships with her therapist and therapy as a whole. She jumps back and forth between widely different eras of her life with little framing or transition. It's fairly expected that in a book of memory versus the now there's going to be a non-linear format. But keeping the reader in on what era one is currently taking place in the story (and thus keeping the reader to the story) is essential and Bechdel slacks off, almost as though she couldn't be bothered to go back and clarify her stream of consciousness for the reader. It's almost a joke that in one panel, a calender announcing "DECEMBER 2006" hangs on her mother's kitchen wall.
Still, the book is riveting, largely in part to Bechdel's stellar artwork. While I maintain that the various quotes get more text than they deserve, Bechdel seems to realize their tedium and attempts to make up for it with at times breathtaking cinematic angles and elaborate divisions of panels. It calls to mind both Habibi and The Annotated Northwest Passage for sheer beauty of angle and telling of action/emotion.
While the book disappoints on a number of key levels, it still has enough pluses to earn it a place alongside other classics of the graphic novel memoir genre (such as Persepolis, Epileptic, and Fun Home) even if it mostly serves as a companion to the last.
Notable: Something nitpicky, but I am nothing if not nitpicky.
While rehearsing her conversation with her mother about the memoir of her father she's writing, she ponders what her mother might say about "the truth" Bechdel longs to tell about her father, including "His bisexuality, the suicide," before capping "You don't mind, do you?"
This is perhaps a hazy distinction, and even one some argue isn't worth making. But Bechdel's father wasn't bisexual. He was a closeted gay man. It's what helped in tearing his marriage apart. Merely because he fathered children with a woman doesn't make him bisexual. Or is Bechdel referring (in a much more problematic way) to the practice (specifically by her father) of bisexuality, rather than the identity of bisexuality? Still, bisexuality as a practice is truly the practice of being attracted to both (and/or all) genders. It is possible to have sex with someone of the gender to which one is not attracted and still not be attracted to that gender. Referring to "practicing" bisexuality as having sexual relationships with both men and women simultaneously (as Bechdel's father was apparently doing, although we do not know if he continued to be sexually active with Bechdel's mother after the birth of their last child which would then mean he was only having sex with the men and boys Bechdel mentions in Fun Home) is something now recognized as intensely problematic as well as false. Such misconceptions have led to the dismissal that bisexual people somehow cease to be bisexual if they are in a monogamous relationship (meaning that if their partner was the same gender, they're now homosexuals and if their partner was of a different gender, heterosexuals).
Biphobia and heterosexism within even the Queer community is nothing new, particularly for a monosexual of the generation from which Bechdel hails (the same, incidentally, as Dan Savage). But it still gave me pause, particularly since, well, Bechdel should know better.
She as the memoirist has the right to portray her father as she sees fit, but given the way she's portrayed him in action versus the way she verbally describes him, it feels false and uncomfortably (even offensively) so, particularly from an artist who's dealt with racism and transphobia within the Queer community.
Title: Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
Details: Copyright 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
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."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd read Fun Home and been impressed by its art (I'd previously been kinda "meh" about Bechdel; her work was one more in a sea of "edgy" '90s cartoons I'd consumed as a kid). I was excited (if trepidatious; I know how these things can work out) that she had another memoir coming out.
How I Liked It: Are You My Mother? begins with Bechdel rehearsing how she's going to break it to her mother that she wants to write a book about her father. Actually, it begins (like all chapters of the book) with a dream Bechdel has (that she then analyzes) that's relevant to that particular chapter. I was slightly antsy about this being a book about Bechdel writing a book. Nothing necessarily wrong with that in principle, but it can too easily be utterly boring to read.
Other authors have included some navel-gazing in their memoirs, particularly of the graphic novel variety. Before I'd read this book (and I've read a lot of graphic novel memoirs), Art Spiegelman's Maus (both volumes) had contained the most "writing-about-writing-this-book" material. I found this pardonable since A), if he didn't invent the graphic novel memoir, he certain pioneered it as well as graphic novels as a whole (and since the medium was fledgling to non-existent at the time of his writing, some puzzling out of his place was only natural) and B, overall, his reflecting on the work itself was not the primary story. This is perhaps in part a personal preference. Writing about writing the book you are writing (and having that be your focal point) seems incredibly lazy to me and mainly only worthwhile in getting out of writer's block. Part of the reason I could never get into Harvey Pekar's American Splendor was that too damn much of it (that I'd read, anyhow) was based on how he was talking to the illustrator or to himself to talk to the illustrator about the particular comic in which he was appearing. There comes a point where, to me, a story just ceases to exist if it's looking at itself; the whole thing is just too self-conscious. (Incidentally, I omit Pekar's Splendor from the memoir category since I felt it was based far more on his present life day to day rather than his memories of the past.)
Mother is presented, more or less, as the counterpart to Fun Home, this time telling the story of Bechdel's relationship with her mother rather than her father. It's hard not to get the feeling from the packaging that an advertising exec from the publisher resisted the urge to have some variant of "You've read about her father, now read about her mother!" on the cover.
But Mother isn't really about Bechdel's mother, which is the problem. Her relationship with her mother isn't so much about her relationship with her mother as her relationship with her mother in regards to Bechdel's last book. Too often, Mother seems like a "The Making of Fun Home". Too much of her revelations about her mother are not based in the seeming "b-plots", the stories of her interaction and relationship of her mother through the years, they're based in writing Fun Home. Could a great deal of revelation about her mother come through the creation of that memoir which thus fueled this book? Certainly. But it feels like that impetus should be left on the cutting room floor and the reader should be skipped straight to Bechdel's epiphanies rather than, say, the epiphany she had when reading through her father's old letters in research for Fun Home.
Even if this book settled openly on Bechdel's relationship with her mother in light of the revelations brought to light by Bechdel's process through her last book, it wouldn't necessarily have the "navel-gazing/page-fill" that Mother so often has. After all, her creation of the memoir has undeniably passed and she's drawing on past events. But Bechdel also covers her process for this book, including what almost read like diary entries on what she has so far. It feels almost as though Bechdel is stalling for page space.
Her "as I'm writing the book you're currently reading" isn't the only seeming page-fill. Bechdel bloats the book with chunks of quotes (reproduced in their original text form from the books they derive) from Donald Winnicott with pertinent sections actually highlighted. This also serves to all-too-frequently tie up the narrative with circular-thinking psychobabble that feels as though Bechdel is dancing around the real issues at hand. Too many stories/angles that would better serve the book are left unexplored. Bechdel's impulse as a seven-year-old to draw a sexually explicit cartoon (a doctor intimately examines a little girl and Bechdel captions it with "Doctor Cleaning a Little Girl's Tee-Tee Place") and her mother's subsequent discovery of the cartoon and Bechdel's adult connection between that moment and her mother's abrupt conclusion the next day that Bechdel is "too old to be kissed goodnight anymore" is worth more consideration, particularly into her mother's motives (and thus character). Dichotomy such as her mother's comfort with teaching Bechdel and her two younger brothers the proper names of male genitalia during a nightly bath (presumably before the cartoon incident) but discomfort when Bechdel then asks for the proper term for her own (her mother fends her off with "I'll find out what it is and tell you later.") warrants further examination. Her mother's frequent assertions of her equality to her husband (after one such fight, she makes a point of clarifying to a child Bechdel that she and Bechdel's father are equals) yet apparent hatred of the concept of reproductive choice (she breaks her lifelong staid apolitical stance to participate in a demonstration on the fourth anniversary of Roe V. Wade) is another such interesting dichotomy. The fact there's a narrative suggestion that Bechdel's father may have attempted to persuade her mother to have an abortion on at least one pregnancy (Bechdel's mother was already a few months pregnant when they married, another area worth exploring: to what extent did they marry because they felt they had to do so?) is an intriguing angle that Bechdel never pursues.
So oddly, it's not so much that Bechdel focuses too much on herself and her process in the narrative, it's the fact she focuses too much on herself in the wrong places. When there's an anecdote that would not only benefit the storyline but benefit from further exploration, Bechdel resorts to the general, filling panels with quotes from Winnicott (and Bechdel's own often incomprehensible translation of them) and anecdotes and asides from his life, rather than her own. It's not Winnicott's views on the mother's concept of separateness from her child that deserves page after page, it's Bechdel's own mother's views that bear exploring.
The book also doesn't have enough room (possibly due to aforementioned misplaced focus) to properly flesh out (and differentiate) Bechdel's relationships with her therapist and therapy as a whole. She jumps back and forth between widely different eras of her life with little framing or transition. It's fairly expected that in a book of memory versus the now there's going to be a non-linear format. But keeping the reader in on what era one is currently taking place in the story (and thus keeping the reader to the story) is essential and Bechdel slacks off, almost as though she couldn't be bothered to go back and clarify her stream of consciousness for the reader. It's almost a joke that in one panel, a calender announcing "DECEMBER 2006" hangs on her mother's kitchen wall.
Still, the book is riveting, largely in part to Bechdel's stellar artwork. While I maintain that the various quotes get more text than they deserve, Bechdel seems to realize their tedium and attempts to make up for it with at times breathtaking cinematic angles and elaborate divisions of panels. It calls to mind both Habibi and The Annotated Northwest Passage for sheer beauty of angle and telling of action/emotion.
While the book disappoints on a number of key levels, it still has enough pluses to earn it a place alongside other classics of the graphic novel memoir genre (such as Persepolis, Epileptic, and Fun Home) even if it mostly serves as a companion to the last.
Notable: Something nitpicky, but I am nothing if not nitpicky.
While rehearsing her conversation with her mother about the memoir of her father she's writing, she ponders what her mother might say about "the truth" Bechdel longs to tell about her father, including "His bisexuality, the suicide," before capping "You don't mind, do you?"
This is perhaps a hazy distinction, and even one some argue isn't worth making. But Bechdel's father wasn't bisexual. He was a closeted gay man. It's what helped in tearing his marriage apart. Merely because he fathered children with a woman doesn't make him bisexual. Or is Bechdel referring (in a much more problematic way) to the practice (specifically by her father) of bisexuality, rather than the identity of bisexuality? Still, bisexuality as a practice is truly the practice of being attracted to both (and/or all) genders. It is possible to have sex with someone of the gender to which one is not attracted and still not be attracted to that gender. Referring to "practicing" bisexuality as having sexual relationships with both men and women simultaneously (as Bechdel's father was apparently doing, although we do not know if he continued to be sexually active with Bechdel's mother after the birth of their last child which would then mean he was only having sex with the men and boys Bechdel mentions in Fun Home) is something now recognized as intensely problematic as well as false. Such misconceptions have led to the dismissal that bisexual people somehow cease to be bisexual if they are in a monogamous relationship (meaning that if their partner was the same gender, they're now homosexuals and if their partner was of a different gender, heterosexuals).
Biphobia and heterosexism within even the Queer community is nothing new, particularly for a monosexual of the generation from which Bechdel hails (the same, incidentally, as Dan Savage). But it still gave me pause, particularly since, well, Bechdel should know better.
She as the memoirist has the right to portray her father as she sees fit, but given the way she's portrayed him in action versus the way she verbally describes him, it feels false and uncomfortably (even offensively) so, particularly from an artist who's dealt with racism and transphobia within the Queer community.
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I also feel that bisexual is an abused term, used by the ignorant because it's less "gay" and gives them the safe heterosexual option. From Fun Home, I never got the "feeling" Bechdel was trying to describe a frustrated bisexual man. If he had an attraction to his wife, it was probably attached to her acting, not herself as a person (at least from the way their marriage played out).
I wonder how you felt about the father having pedophilic (?) tendencies in FH; there's a different between the abuse of children and a legit sexual orientation. Sometimes I felt she wasn't making the necessary separation.
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