Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama Hardcover
Author: Visit Amazon's Alison Bechdel Page - ISBN: 0618982507 - Language: English - Format: PDF, EPUB
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From Bookforum
Review
"In Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel poses an infinity of thought-provoking questions about women, literature, feminism, family bonds, psychology and the complicated relationship between therapist and patient...The book is a page turner, thanks in part to Bechdel's lovely and subtle illustrations. Bechdel's examination of her relationship with her mother also touches on the universal push and pull between mothers and children...The book's transcendent ending is Bechdel's expression of love for her own 'good enough mother.'"—USA Today
"Sad, funny, sprawling graphic memoir...An intensely personal, specific story, but Bechdel's imaginative narrative techniques make it easily as compelling as any fiction...Its stylistic flexibility accomodates more layers than any straight documentary or prose memoir could support...This work is her link in the long chain connecting her foremothers and their daughters and all of the other women who shaped her."—The Atlantic
"A staggering achievement...Although Bechdel utilizes all the features of the graphic-novel form, she is so intelligent and perceptive that this story of self-discovery (an abused term, but never more apt) would still be compelling if told only in prose...Are You My Mother? is a masterwork that gracefully documents the torture that sensitive people can put themselves through while searching for the casual movers of their lives."—The Daily Beast
"Are You My Mother? is a tremendously intimate work, more so even than Fun Home. Taken together, the two books are a practical guide to the complicated, unspoken negotiations that take place between children and their parents, those sphinxlike beings who give us life and then promptly deal us near fatal psychic wounds.Watching Bechdel dig into the underworld of her subconscious is paradoxically uplifting. The courage and rigor with which she examines her life make readers feel as if their own secrets might not be quite so unspeakable."—Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
"...Magnificent... Whatever issues Bechdel has with her mother, one always has the sense that she likes her as much as she loves her. That affection — and the real sense one gets of her mother reading these pages, running her finger over the tenderly drawn panels of their history — gives this book an urgency and an intimacy that Fun Home, in retrospect, lacked... Bechdel's triumph is not just that she's emerged from her tunnel, with weary but clear eyes, but that she's brought her mother with her. Grade: A"—Entertainment Weekly
"...Are You My Mother is as complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs...The tragedy and comedy are so entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can't help being fascinated. The book delivers lightening bolts of revelation...I haven't encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time. In fact, the book made such a deep impression on me that after reading it I walked around for days seeing little bits and snatches of my life as Alison Bechdel drawings."—The New York Times Book Review
"Are You My Mother is a work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking."—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated
"Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!"—Gloria Steinem
"This book is not so much the sequel to Alison Bechdel’s captivating memoir Fun Home, as the maternal yin to its paternal yang. Bravely worrying out the snarled web of missed connections that bedevil her relationship with her remarkable mother from the very start, Bechdel deploys everyone from Virginia Woolf to D.W. Winnicott (the legendary psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie the snares of a fraught past. She arrives, at long last, at something almost as shimmering as it is simple: a grace-flecked accommodation and an affirming love."—Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences and Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative
"A psychologically complex, ambitious, illuminating successor to the author’s graphic-memoir masterpiece." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"[Bechdel's] lines and angles are sharper than in Fun Home, and yet her self-image and her views of family members, lovers, and analysts are thorough, clear, and kind. Mothers, adult daughters, literati, memoir fans, and psychology readers are among the many who will find this outing a rousing experience . . . This may be the most anticipated graphic novel of the year." -- Booklist, starred review
"A fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Are You My Mother? offers an improbably profound master class in how to live an examined life . . . More moving and illuminating than Fun Home." -- Elle
"The best writers, whether they are creating fiction or nonfiction, are trying to find out what makes people human for better and for worse. A taut, complex book within several books, Bechdel’s investigation of her relationship with her mother and the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offers the most articulate answer you’re likely to ingest. You’ll feel like Alice climbing your way out the jagged rabbit hole to limbo." -- Library Journal
DETAILS
- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0618982507
- ISBN-13: 978-0618982509
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #34,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #43 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Biographies & History Graphic Novels
- #58 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Literary
- #94 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Child Psychology
REVIEWS
Wave goodbyeThe stars haven 39 t faded they aren t yet dead They ll continue to burn and will never die until you tear them from the sky Wave goodbye 16 hours ago 1 Early life 2 Career 2 1 Fun Home 2 2 Are You My Mother 3 Personal life 4 Selected works 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External linksDeadpool Wade Winston Wilson is a fictional character a mercenary and anti hero appearing in comic books published by Marvel Comics Created by artist Rob Liefeld INVENTORY BIOGRAPHY Autobiography Memoirs Related Mass Market Paperbacks Hardcover books Trade Paperbacks FOR SALE 1 INVENTORY BIOGRAPHY Autobiography I learned of this book in my University of Maryland alumni magazine and I 39 m very glad I did The author Jeff Kinney wrote a popular comic strip called Igdoof in House of Hilton From Conrad to Paris A Drama of Wealth Power and Privilege Jerry Oppenheimer on Amazon com FREE shipping on qualifying offers This intimate Usage of targeting option is paid An additional commission of 50 from each repost transaction will be charged DetailsDiscover new books online at Lulu Publishers of fiction textbooks children 39 s books eBooks and more Buy online at Lulu today Comes with a Mirror Locket W W W W The First 2 Books in the Epic New Series Hardcover 9 99 2994 Save Read the Entire Thrilling Series 24 Stationery Sheets 118 Reviews With over fifty new poems from Britain 39 s favourite poet You Made Me Late Again is an essential addition to Pam Ayres 39 incomparable collection of works
A story about a dead parent has a beginning and an end. A story about a living parent is quite a different thing, especially if you know the parent will be reading the story and you're invested in their response. With all that, I am astonished and in awe of Bechdel's courage - not just to reveal herself so intimately, but to do the same for her relationship with her mother.
This is not Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 2. It's much more complicated and diffuse. Bechdel's story about her father felt complete and symmetrical. This is much more distant and intellectual with the trailing off nature inherent to a story about two living people who continue to interact. Again and again we return to the image of Bechdel reading in this book . . . reading books about psychoanalysis, reading old correspondence between her parents, even reading transcripts of telephone conversations between her mother and herself (she would type what her mother was saying during the calls). She relates to her mother through reading and this central image tells us more about the brokenness of the relationship than anything else. Her mother, in return, will tell her about stories she reads in the New York Times that make her point instead of saying directly what it is she wants to say. There is little that is tactile or intimate about their relationship. The reader winds up thinking their way through the book in the same way that Bechdel has thought through her relationship with her mother.
In Fun Home, Bechdel used literature, concepts of sexual identity, and even mythology to explore and illuminate her relationship with her father.
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