Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? is a brilliant graphic novel exploring her relationship with her mother.

A follow up in some ways to her wonderful book about her father, Fun Home, Are You My Mother? incorporates Bechdel's reading of psychoanalytic theory (primarily Winnicott, as well as Klein and Lacan) in her attempts to understand the flawed bond between herself and her emotionally withholding mother. In addition to theory, Bechdel entwines her readings of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich to inform her understanding of her mother's artistic conflicts, as well as her own.

The chronology of Are You M Mother? is complex and layered, circling back on several different periods of her life, including different adult relationships and different therapists.

As much as I enjoyed this book, and as deeply impressed I was by the endeavor, I felt that something was missing, some real sense of who her mother was, or maybe more simply I just wanted a clearer more traditional narrative arc -- more of a story story.

Rent Girl

Rent Girl, Michelle Tea's illustrated memoir about being a young hooker in Boston, is totally engaging.

The writing has a light, conversational style that sucks you in. Vignettes are presented in an offhand fashion. Yet the voice deepens and grows on you and I began to feel invested in the narrator. The tales of hooking are gritty and sad, filled with mundane and sometimes humorous details.

Laurenn McCubbin's illustrations add a tremendous amount to the story, really breathing life into aspects of it.

Rent Girl chronicles Tea's relationships and struggles to find a way to get by financially without compromising self or aesthetics, and in this way it's sort of a coming of age story.

I really enjoyed it!

The Alcoholic

Woke up pretty early this morning with a cold/sinus infection or some such unpleasant shit, and read The Alcoholic, by Jonathan Ames. A friend lent me the copy of this graphic novel (illustrations by Dean Haspiel).

I really enjoyed it, but it left me sad and somehow unfulfilled. Most of the material is familiar, a reworking of the stuff from I Love You More than You Know and Wake Up, Sir! But The Alcoholic is darker, more intimate, less humorous, and kind of painful. There is so much loss, and the self-loathing is not quite relieved. There was such a sense of isolation, although it ends on an ambiguous but possibly hopeful note.

When you read someone whose material is largely autobiographical, you really fee like you know them, and I confess after quickly devouring three Ames books this year, I feel close to him. It's a weird feeling, though.

The Fatal Bullet

A comic book I had been anxiously awaiting arrived today, and I devoured it on my subway rides. The Fatal Bullet: a true account of the assassination, lingering pain, death, and burial of James A. Garfield, twentieth president of the United States, also including the inglorious life and career of the despised assassin Guiteau is a wonderful historical piece. The writing is taut and very witty and the illustrations are great.

This is part of Rick Geary's series, A Treasury of Victorian Murder. I can't wait to dive into Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper next!

Fun Home

I started Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel on the subway on my way to work this morning and could not put it down all day. I had a two hour break between presentations where I sat in a Starbucks completely absorbed in it. Then I spent another couple of hours with it on my couch.

It's a graphic novel memoir about a woman's strange family life. He father ran a funeral home and was a closeted homosexual. The story is very much about the pall that his shame and unhappiness cast on his family. The way they lived with something that was never said or understood but that which effected them all very much. It's also about how the daughter reconstructs her own and her family's past, how she begins to understand her anxieties and her relationships with her parents. It is interspersed with the unfolding of her own gay sexuality as well as her and her family's reading of literature. Joyce, Collette, Fitzgerald and Camus are very much entwined in the story. I thought it was excellent. It was incredibly sweet, and creepy, and fascinating, and moving.