Are You My Mother?

I really enjoyed Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir, Fun Home, and was looking forward to reading the next installment Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). However, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. I was expecting there to be more that connected it to the previous memoir about her father, who was a mystery and lived a double life before checking out. There was much too much about therapists and psychoanalysis--privileged people who think too much. That being said, her mother doesn't come off as a sympathetic or nurturing person and I can imagine that caused some problems for Bechdel and I think we are all injured by our parents for something, but we have the option of getting over it--past it--and can create our own lives. Some of the secondary writing was interesting, but the Winnicot stuff was over done in my opinion. It was a very navel gazing exercise as she recounted whole conversations, therapy sessions, and journal entries. That's not to say that the drawings weren't excellent or that some sections weren't outstanding. As a whole it didn't engage me the way that her previous memoir, Fun Home, about her father did.