"It's enough to drive you crazy." (But in the best way possible)

I think about the statement that Elmaz made last week during class. She asserted that the best map we can to read a graphic memoir is the one the author gives us in the work itself - if we pay attention to the strategies employed in language and image. I want to suggest that one of the keys to understanding Are You My Mother is offered to us on page 31 where Bechdel shares an excerpt of a letter she received in her early twenties from her mother, which says:

"I dream about brain tumors and babies. I am staring out my dirty windows at the lilac buds. Now I am trying to analyze why I put those two things together. Why do you and I do that. Patterns are my existence. Everything has significance. Everything must fit. It's enough to drive you crazy."

Through Are You My Mother, Bechdel in a sense invites us, into an encounter with the ways in which she has constructed narratives to hold her sometimes precarious sense of the world together - by forming connections and patterns in life, and then in the text, where everything is given significance, everything is made to fit. Here we encounter her genius/madness, and its live unraveling - in her relationship with her mother, the process of writing both Fun Home and Are You My Mother, her intimate partnerships, and through therapy. The problem of this text, and the impetus to draw patterns out seems to stem from the Bechdel's feeling that:

"this memoir about my mother... has no beginning... Sort of like how I'd understood human reprofuction as a child. I was an egg inside my mother when she was still an egg inside her mother and so forth." (6-7)

As such this piece is in many senses about Bechdel's process of differentiation from her mother and towards herself, which requires the unwinding of the innumerable filaments that both bind Bechdel to her mother and stand in the way of their connection. The way in which Bechdel's mother "looms ... in her psyche" is demonstrated through the first many, many pages of the memoir where we have various examples of the ways in which Bechdel wrestles with the internal voice that prohibits her progress. This is a strong set-up which is followed-through again and again through the piece.

So... thinking about the idea that bridging all of the disparate pieces of complex life together into some coherent pattern is "enough to drive you crazy" (but is precisely what Bechdel needs in order to differentiate), it seems an ironic, comic, (likely/deeply) intentional, and intelligent choice that Bechdel makes to structure the piece in a sense (at least to page 141 which is where my reflection currently ends) as one long therapy session. This creative strategy gives this unfolding narrative/s a central core, where they all fit, and can all make some kind of sense... Because in the space of therapy, where theoretically the absolute opening of the mind and heart towards healing takes place, disparate stories naturally emerge to be processed, and it is through processing these stories that we discover the patterns around which we build our sense of the world, and who we are in it.

Bechdel uses the frame of her sessions with Jocelyn and Carol to eventually hold all of the stories that are told. One powerful example of this can be found on page 129. Bechdel has been recounting the process of transcribing the letters her father wrote to her mother around the time her mother had conceived. Bechdel writes about a number of poems her mother composed at this time. In the narration Bechdel reflects:

"As far as I know, these were the last poems she would write for the next forty years." And then seamlessly within the same panel draws us back into a therapy session with Carol where Bechdel states

"Anyway, she's nervous about what I've written, and so am I."

The reader gets the sense through very precise moments like this in the text that everything we have read has been part of an ongoing conversation.

The way in which Bechdel on this same page (again 129) maps her theraputic process with with Carol onto her theraputic process with Jocelyn reinforces the sense of continuity of the story, both as she has dealt with it over life and as we encounter it in the text - and is this despite (and) heightened by the fact that Bechdel says "starting from scratch with a new therapist" was "frustrating." The genius of this moment is that through mentioning the "code" of the "plexiglass dome" used with Jocelyn, and defining it for Carol, Bechdel builds intimacy with the reader, letting us also into the code, and opens the story back into her childhood. The cadence of the retelling is as though she is speaking to Carol. An interesting moment of transference can be said to happen here (and throughout the text) where the reader becomes therapist witness.

(As an connected aside, the phone calls Bechdel has with her mother have a similar structural impact on the piece as the meetings with Carol and Jocelyn - they are particularly powerful for the way in which they are rendered so realistically, where her mother's stream of consciousness monologue introduces stories that Bechdel then transitions us into exploring. Another device to bring the disparate into relationship.)

There are other unique strategies that Bechdel uses to give this piece a centre. For example, she litters this piece with clues and cues, that build up the environment and story around us, sometimes in sneaky ways that help us to develop a subconscious familiarity with content and image. One example of this the red dress. The red dress initially appears on page 30. Bechdel is depicted holding what looks like a red and white striped rag. Much later in the text (page 109) we learn that this is one of Bechdel's childhood dresses. It is likely that many readers may not hold conscious memory of this dress appearing earlier in the text when it finally returns, but there is a subliminal impact, we feel like we know the place or the thing, which opens us more fully to the theoretical and emotional explorations that Bechdel leads us on.

When we finally encounter the red dress - it acquires profound meaning in relationship to the narrative. Bechdel is confronted in a sense through this dress with the complexity of her relationship to her mother. It appears across the page from Alice Miller's theory on the impact of emotional abandonment by parents on their children, and is vested with huge emotional weight as Bechdel recognizes the material "evidence of [her] mother's care" which she finds wrenching upon examining the patch her mother carefully applied. Another relateable transitional object which become invested with deepening layers of meaning throughout the text is Beezum, the stuffed bear.

Bechdel uses a distinctly circular approach to storytelling, and this helps to tie the individual pieces together, quite cinematically. An example of this is through the introduction of stories that seem told to completion in their initial rendering, but that are then busted open as Bechdel circles into back story which provides us with deeper and more hard hitting emotional context. One example of this is the story Bechdel tells on page 137 of her mother informing when she is 7 years old that she is too old to be kissed goodnight. As stands in it's first telling the emotional impact is weighty and a great deal seems to be revealed about the family dynamic and the particular relationship between Bechdel and her mother. But when Bechdel makes the link between (draws a pattern to) that transformation in her relationship with her mother to her mother's the discovery of "gynecological fantasy" Bechdel had drawn the day earlier we start to see perhaps the more underlying issues at hand. When this story is placed beside the story her mother tells of her initial bout of depression in her twenties setting on due to the combination of over work and the disclosure a friend makes regarding a queer crush, we start to understand everything with even more clarity... We start to see the way in which the sexual repression and rejection forged huge distance between Bechdel and her mother from an incredibly young age.

This is already hella long so I'm going to just talk about one more piece, the collage pages that show up intermittently throughout the text. Bechdel's form is not completely consistent throughout this piece and I think that is reflective of her striving to pull divergent different pieces into relationship to form a coherent whole, which can't always happen in the space of rigid panels; precisely because she is exploring how stories/themes/images/totems (one small example being the number 11) cross and are layered on top of each other. These pages offer a kind of chaotic relief, where we can see how things sit together. Let's just take pages 132-133 as an example. Here a drawing done by Bechdel as a child depicting her "perfect environment" where she was attempting to "go-on-being without disruption" is placed in relationship to a letter from Bechdel's father to her mother, beside a poem that her mother wrote around the time of her conception, on top of which sit Bechdel's glasses and atop which the largest text is theory written by Winnicot. This panel can be read as Bechdel's attempt (through her glasses) to see the interconnections between the "false-identity" of her father, her own mother's isolation and creative suppression (she wouldn't write poems for 40 years after this) producing Bechdel's need for safety and unconditional love and attention, in conversation with something much broader than her individual lived experience - Winnicott's research. So these pages don't only represent Bechdel's desire to draw the patterns for herself, but to in a sense make/draw attention to how her life and these perhaps regular stories hold greater symbolic meaning, as Virginia Wolf did.

So much more to say...

To close, while doing all of the work she does to draw convincing patterns in a complicated life, I think Bechdel is also self-reflexive in moments and reveals the possibility that the narratives she has written perhaps don't always hold perfectly... Demonstrating perhaps as Thomas King asserts, that "The truth about stories is that that's all we are."