Allison Bechdel's book, Are You My Mother? is another brilliantly rendered account of her life. The book is wrapped in a waxy red dust jacket replete with gold text and gold highlights. Hating to have it slip up and down as I read, I tore it off and tossed it to the floor. To my delight, I discovered the wonderful artwork on the flat-white vinyl cover underneath.

The picture shows Allison as a child, having her photograph taken in a field by a mother age woman in one, and a grandmother age woman in the other. The pictures are very warming and evocative, candid. They seem to be snapshots of a road trip in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by endless fields. The lack of background besides the car and a tiny bit of road emphasizes her smallness, her vulnerability. Her littleness seems so little. She even has a band aid on her knee in one. The end papers have beautiful grey wash paintings of, we assume, Bechdel's face as a child. In the first, she is serious, downcast, the second, brooding angry, perhaps a bit older. Bechdel invested a lot in her portrayal of the speaker's/ her child-self. She goes to great lengths to proves how innocent she was, how impressionable, how hard she worked at being lovable. The cover art really sums that up for me, she has hidden her exposed, waifish girl self under a cover littered with the trappings of adult feminine persona: golden nudes sit on either side of a box that pearls spill out of, compacts, puffs, brushes and perfume scatter across the dresser top. The title of the book floats in a shiny gold mirror above the desk, a flag to her deepest fears, are you my mother?

Thanks to her meticulous documentation of her own life: her child-hood journals, her transcribed telephone conversations with her mother, typing up her father's letters, and carefully reading and re-reading corresponding literature, Bechdel is able to patch together a narrative as intricate and cohesive as a well-made quilt. Without careful handling, these disparate shreds of insight would be no more than tattered remnants, but she manages to use them in a way that is even-paced and cohesive. She finds several meta thread-throughs that tie the different bodies of work together. At the center of this collaged text, are the works of Donald Winicott, whose theories about the "false self" and the "good-enough mother" intertwine with her own reflections on her mother in a balletic call and response. She uses the quotes to highlight the "elephant in the room" within her sketches- the gaping, awkward holes in her character's life are filled and explained and validated by the external voyeur of the psychoanalyst.

She introduces great literature, skimming some and quoting large swaths of others. It's exciting to see references to Adrienne Rich and Anne Bradstreet. Her inclusion of so many drawings of book covers was great, her bibliography is illustrated, each drawn cover complete with tiny cramped author's names. This was a quiet but solid shout-out to the powerful body of work she was referencing. It gives the reader the impetus to read some of these works as well, having already been given a crash course in their major themes.

After visiting Bechdel's website, I felt that she had misrepresented her fame and her body of work. I looked at her wikipedia page and saw she'd published so, so many books before Funhome and Are You...? She seems to want the reader to believe that she is a creative ingenue. She makes very little reference to the success of her earlier books- collections of her comics, "Dykes to Watch Out For"- which have been widely published and even translated. The speaker in the book talks only in dismayed tones about this body of work, dismissing it's success and constantly feeling strapped financially. This (unconscious?) belittling of self reinforces her portrayal of herself as helpless and vulnerable.