Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch out For and creator/author of the graphic memoir Fun Home, has a new book out entitled Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
Bechdel weaves emotional honesty with highbrow deliberation in a way that is never burdensome, and mostly light. “Fun Home” is subtitled “A Family Tragicomic,” and in both books the tragedy and the comedy are so consummately entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can’t help being fascinated. “Are You My Mother?” manages to incorporate complicated and sometimes arcane references – to psychoanalysis and the theories of the pediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, to the work of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich – into a story that is gripping and funny and radiantly clear.
The book is getting favorable reviews else where, like the Burlington Free Press and Salon