That quote, from page 217 sums up a lot of my experience with Are You My Mother. This book reads to me more like a biography of Donald Winnicott (and a manual on psychoanalysis) than a memoir of Alison Bechdel's mother. I was interested in getting some insight into Bechdel's mother, but there isn't a lot of that offered. It reminded a lot of the notes in the back of The Impostor's Daughter, when the interviewer asks Laurie Sandell about writing a book about her mother, and she says she could not do that because her mother is unknown to her. After finishing Are You My Mother, I still felt like I did not know her mother. In fact, I feel like I'm not sure exactly what she was trying to write. There is a box on page 29 that is in the shape that has been used for her mother's dialogue while on the phone, but it does not seem like something her mother is saying. The text here says, "But it's hard to figure out what the story is." That's how I felt a the end of the book: I still don't know what the story is.
The tie between Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott seems tenuous, at best. I understand that Bechdel is drawing parallels between her relationship with her mother and Woolf's relationship with her own mother, but I don't really understand why she ties Woolf to her experience of psychoanalysis. I also understand that she is writing about her experience with psychoanalysis, but I do not feel that I needed all the technical terms and details about Winnicott's approach to psychoanalysis to understand her experience.
When Allison has a very frustrating conversation with her mother about her mother's discomfort with her book, and with her openness about her sexuality, one banner reads "I couldn't speak without revealing that I was crying. In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly" (228). In the next panel, she tells us what that is, "Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault" (228). To me, this is the meat of the entire book. She is coming to terms with the fact that her relationship with her mother will never be what she actually wants it to be. This revelation renders all the therapy jargon and even some of the therapy scenes as unnecessary. This is the moment she has been working toward. It's a very poignant moment, but it does not seem to be any richer for having a lot of background information about psychoanalysis.
I agree that "the jargon really gets in the way." The whole thing with the indirect object is really unclear to me. What I can relate to is what the narrator says about not knowing what the story is, which in a way authenticates the memoir and imbues it with some truth. Rather than forcing her book to cohere somehow by turning it into a story (thereby rendering it fiction?), the resolution, or the "coming to terms" that you mention is confusing and fraught, in the way that life is.
ReplyDeleteYou hit a resonant note -- all the psycho talk, terminology, and background on noted therapists really got in the way of my understanding her mother, and their relationship. This took quite a bit away from what I was looking for in the book. I ended up feeling that we never get to know with certainty, and perhaps that is deliberate.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that really is Bechdel's point: that she does not really know her mother, and that their relationship is tense...that at best they've called a truce and hope for it to be permanent. I found the book frustrating and at times very tedious. I also felt misled in some way, because I was looking for a memoir about her mother, but her mother's appearances in the book are sporadic. She's sometimes absent for almost entire sections of the book. It reminds of something Kirsten Saxton said in one of my first undergrad classes at Mills, that an introduction or opening paragraph is like an invitation to a date. You can't tell someone you're going to take him or her to dinner and a movie and then take him or her bowling. That person will be disappointed and not dressed appropriately. I felt like Bechdel took me bowling.
ReplyDeleteAny strikes? I hear what you're saying Rhonda (so does Margot, who is considering spelling her name Margeaux, what do you think?) The points of psychotherapy aren't so much her sessions as how she relates to the object theories of Winnicott--so we get some precie on him (and i'm wondering why she did so much of the work for the reader?)
ReplyDeleteSo the promise of a therapy session is not fulfilled along with the dinner and the movie. I will be interested in your colleagues response to where did you enter emotionally?
e
Wow. I just posted (belatedly) and I referenced the same page (228) because I consider this passage--all the way through page 229--to be the summation of the analysis. I had learned, by this place in the book, I think all I could or needed to about Bechdel's relationship with her mother.
ReplyDeleteI talked about how I felt the terminology and pyscoanalytical (jeez I can barely spell it) jargon got in that way and in many ways I felt, interrupted the flow of her narrative. I also expected to hear more about her mother but felt that this was, even as she says, was more of a way for her to come to grips or heal a bit within her relationship with her mom. I feel like just like her OCD and having to write everything down, this we just another form of that. She needed to document and write down everything about her father and mother so that she could release or feel better. I'm not sure but perhaps this is why she includes all that "other stuff" because this in many ways is just another documenting journal of what's she reading, going through, etc.
ReplyDelete