Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Are You My Mother? | 2012 | Alison Bechdel | Buy |
Are You My Mother? (2012) is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother, Helen Bechdel. Where Fun Home dealt with her father’s hidden life and sudden death, this book grapples with the more ambiguous challenge of understanding a parent who is alive, present, and yet emotionally unavailable.
The book draws on the psychoanalytic theories of Donald Winnicott and Virginia Woolf’s writings to explore how mothers and daughters communicate, or fail to. Bechdel’s detailed black-and-white panels reproduce therapy sessions, phone conversations, and childhood memories as she tries to make sense of a relationship defined as much by silence as by speech.