"The moment when a feeling enters a body..."

"The moment when a feeling enters a body is political."

-- Adrienne Rich


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I want to apologize, again, for being late. I had a terrible weekend! In order to not get into too many details, my husband left for another long sea trial, my computer crashed, and I spent all night trying to repair it and didn't sleep until 4 'o clock or so. It's been a long, trying day, and tomorrow after class I fly to Boston (trying to prepare for that, too), and to be honest, I am simply trying to get by!

But enough of me. When I finished Are You My Mother? : A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel, I knew that I had in my hands a literary graphic masterpiece. It went beyond Fun Home: A Tragic Comic in ways I can't fully describe, but it may have to do with its insularity, its deconstruction of a multiplicity of texts--both visually and intellectually and metaphysically--and the extraction of the self via the archetype and mythology of the mother. To be perfectly honest, I don't know, at least, I don't feel quite apt or readily "smart" enough to deconstruct it myself. I have longed enjoyed graphic comics since a young child, as I had once said, and never had I let myself be "taught" by a visual text to read it like a literary form. But when I finished this book, I knew it had churned something in me in the same ways great literature has shifted my core. I have to admit, Fun Home may be a more easily digestive narrative and it, too, is a great literary comic. But there is something Are You My Mother? that does a tenfold more than Fun Home. In my most layman terms, I'll try to get to the bottom of it.

The visual landscape of Mother transcribe the monotonous undertones of what creates a memoir, what the process of writing the self is, and how the consumption of images via the sequence of panels build a realistic world in the mind, in the grandiose mindscape of the human psyche. First, the panels surround the thematic linkages of each chapter's title and dream. The book is built and depends on the cyclicality, on the structure, and what's interesting is that Bechdel juts to-and-fro from the book's sense of "present" (example, page 286, the narration explains that her mother has finally given her the positive appreciation of Bechdel's art in present tense: "But today she seems to want to say something positive) to the past, focusing and distilling the writing process itself as an act of, as Virginia Woolf says, a way to put one's past "to rest." To free oneself, to purify oneself, is a common modality that seeps into this book like a fire or a ripple or rage, and the book beautifully shows the arduous and painstaking task of writing and living. Bechdel ruminates in the beginning: "You cannot live and write at the same time." And yet, Bechdel shows her everyday process, the meticulous details of her life, her relationships, her phone calls with her mother, her journaling (and her mother's, which is more detail-oriented than an exploration of the mind), and the events that move Bechdel along, the passion that moves her along, and the "good-enough" mothers she finds in her two therapists.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but thank Bechdel for divulging her conversations with her two therapists and her search for her own self through the obsessed analyst and deconstruction of Winnicott's and Freud's work. Her forays into Adrienne Rich's and Virginia Wolf's work, alongside their speeches, allows me to see, and almost touch, the way that words permeate into the mind and fixate themselves onto our souls. What makes this memoir do ten thousand things at once is the way it plays with the consumption of images and text. Textual information given in a visual sense does something to the mind that's nonverbal and verbal at the same time. This book was, to me, like a film, like a written novel, and like drawn comic all in one. It reminded me quite readily of Last Year in Marienbad, a film so obsessed with memory and its faulty compulsions, and I felt as if Bechdel was visually and mentally playing with the act of memoir and memory as much as discovering herself through her mother.

This book is so much more about Bechdel, as Bechdel stands and is, than her mother--but at the same time, it mirrors itself and becomes more about her mother. It's a piece of art rich with the conundrums of the writer and her daily life. Writing, in my experience, is a selfish and insular act, but is also an expression that directly correlates to the outside world by virtue of recording what can easily be forgotten.

Sincerely, this is a heavy book laden with textual images, memories, dreams, insecurities, and a mesh of self-hatred and self-love and narcissism. But it's a masterpiece. And I'm thankful to have read it at this period of my life when my own narcissism, fear of success, and tendencies toward annihilation of myself and my relationships with others are drastically affecting my writing process and my soul. Bechdel says at the end that she has successfully destroyed her mother and her mother has surmounted the destruction. But in the same way, I feel like she has also destroyed herself, exposing the self literally through this seminal work of interplay between words and images, exposing herself to a degree that's more intentional, more honest, more lying, more mirrored, more everything, and in that process of deconstruction, has finally found herself in the rumble.