Fun Home

Are You My Mother?

8 May 2012

Alison Bechdel is on tour, too bad she isn’t coming to this side of the pond. Last week she presented her 2nd and newest graphic memoir “Are you my mother?“, diving once again into the deepest links that tie her to her progenitor. Focused on the sometimes-tense relationship with her mother AYMM isn’t presented as a sequel to her very harsh hit “Fun Home” but as an even more fascinating portrait of her childhood, mother-daughter relationship and herself  becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.

from a presentation of her latest novel (all photos by Alison Bechdel)
Are you my mother? on display at 57th Street Books in Chicago (all photos by Alison Bechdel)

You probably remember her 2006 novel “Fun Home“, number 1 book of the year (Time mag), a top-seller on NYTimes book-listing and even transformed into a Broadway musical…  although she’s probably best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For which run until 2008.

AYMM brings Alison mother’s unhappy marriage back to the table and embarks herself on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. “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”. One to watch out for.

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