Judging a book by its cover (and formatting and font choice and incorrect punctuation) Mother's Urn is the type of book I would normally run away from as fast as I can. But I trust Margeaux and so I read it twice.
This book is made up of four stories, four stories that repeat themes and images.
The images did not invite me in. They pushed me to go away and the only place to turn was the text. The text scowled at me with it red color on black page, its italics, its sans serifs. But then the text invited me in with its content, its talk of drugs, its talk of kids on drugs. Those little blue pills.
The images from the story, "Somebody's Mother" are different than the rest of the book. It looks like the artist uses pencil (grey and color) and lots of crosshatching. This creates a more refined look and I am able to see the detail that the artist attempts on the other pages. Maybe something was wrong with my eyes but I couldn't really see the detail in the other stories. Being able to see the details in "Somebody's Mother" causes me to trust the collaborators more. In all the other stories, I relied on the text to 'tell me what was going on", but in "Somebody's Mother", I think you could just see the pictures and figure it out.
I'm moved especially by the image on page 32. Look at it closely. On the left side of the page, there are two children, a child and a smaller baby, slumped over, I assumed from ingesting pills. Upon second glance, the children make up the hair/brain/thoughts of a mother body who is ingesting blue pills down her gullet. The mother's gaze goes past a smaller repeating image of the child and baby slumped. She's not looking at the kids, she's looking at the pill bottle. On the right, there's a gutter of chaos. Objects strewn from the domestic violence the text refers to: "in walks domestic violence stage left." And its even stage left, cool!
With this reading, I think maybe the kids didn't take pills themselves but were affected by their mother's pill taking: "...eating disease on her brain craving knowledge". What are those little red dots that float between the mother's head and the kids' heads? Dots to show us how the mother's thoughts and actions affect the kids'?
Reading this book in whole brought up the "post-therapy memoir" concept Margeaux introduced last week. I see "Are you My Mother?" as a post-therapy memoir, that book couldn't have been written without therapy. It was about therapy, not therapy itself. Mother's Urn rides that line. I propose drafting makes the difference. The more we rework a story the less it becomes about us and the more it becomes about our characters.
In class Margeaux mentioned what Lori Stone says about memoirs that are not emotionally closed. I'm not sure I agree that memoirs that are not post-therapeutic should not be published, but anyways, I see what you mean about how Mother's Urn "rides that line." Whether the process of putting her mother's ashes into the urn that is the book completes the process of therapy for the narrator, or whether resolution is wholly absent from the book is unclear. I'm not sure this kind of story can be categorized in the same way as Are You My Mother?, because I'm not sure it's as concerned with resolution in the first place. In other words, I don't feel like there's a whole lot of reconciliation in the book after the final act of abandonment. I got the impression that the narrator was okay with figuratively cremating her own mother and moving on with her life. There isn't a whole lot of talk about the separation between the mother and the daughter in the end as emotionally damaging, or requiring therapy.
ReplyDeleteFirst, those same illustrations stuck out to me, very much so. I very much think Bechdel's books as well at this one aren't necessarily about the memoir of the beloved, the characters, but rather about a personal experience of therapy. I think that's ok. Some people write to share experiences, to become relatable, and others use it as a means for letting go or release. Either way I enjoy the experience of reading it. I much rather prefer Mother's Urn to Fun Home or Are You My Mother just because I felt like it gave more of a memoir-type insight into Kalamity J's mother and life, more so than the others.
ReplyDeleteThanks for bringing it up Sailor. The position of therapy and trauma will be part of our conversation today. We have to be tough to read this book.
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