Are You My Mother?
Alison Bechdel
An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven.
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.
'As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual. Sunday Times
'It's a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens - and frames things in such a way that you can't help but re-examine your own relationships, too.' Stylist
Product Details
About Alison Bechdel
Reviews for Are You My Mother?
Daily Telegraph
I emotionally lost myself in this book… It made me realise that people aren’t always perfect.
Tavi Gevinson
ELLE
It’s a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens – and frames things in such a way that you can’t help but re-examine your own relationships, too.
Emily Reynolds
Stylist
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 As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual.
Robert Collins
Sunday Times
One of the chief pleasures of this book is how the words and pictures collaborate to gesture at a territory that neither might reach alone.
Tim Martin
Telegraph
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 Pure bliss.
Lisa Appiganesi
Observer
Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.
New York Times
A complex, fascinating and intellectually rich memoir.
Larushka Ivan-Zadek
Metro