Undoing and Chronology throughout

I was surprised at how differently "Are You My Mother?" read from "Fun Home."  I imagine that one of the main reasons for this difference is that her father was no longer living when she wrote and published "Fun Home," and her mother was very much alive when she wrote "Are You My Mother" (to the tune of ritualistic transcriptions of everyday phone conversation).  Yet, it seemed to me that "Fun Home" focused on her childhood, her journey to adulthood, whereas "Are You My Mother?" focused more on her journey through adulthood.  The way in which she delivers "Are You My Mother" is therapeutic.  Regardless of the common appearance of her actual psychiatrist and psychoanalysts or her insistent mentions of Winnicott, it is apparent throughout the read that writing the book itself was the real therapy for Bechdel.

Throughout "Are You My Mother," Bechdel plays with the chronology, so much so that the reader is forced to recognize key details of her life in order to make sense of the time frame.  In the beginning, I found myself playing catch up trying to get a reference point from which psychiatrist she is seeing, Jocelyn  or Carol.  These patterns only become more complex the deeper into the novel I read.  She often refers to something not as having happened in a certain year, but rather as having happened in a certain time period before or after important events in her life.  Stories and events begin to rotate around these pivotal moments in her life, one of these moments, for example, being when she came out to her mother.  She relies on the repetition of moments to ground the reader as we bounce and rotate through her life.  The moment her first psychiatrist asks her if she is angry at her father is repeated at least three times, first on page 50, then on 73, and then on 96, each time the perspective changes and even though I recognized the repetition immediately, each time I read the important dialogue differently.  While Bechdel uses this and other moments repeatedly to lend reference to time, I felt also that she was going back to that memory almost as if she herself was asking herself again- 'Well, am I angry at my father for committing suicide?'
 
It is the chronology that really lends this text to read as Bechdel's intimate personal therapy.  She is piecing together her personal narrative like a puzzle, and as the reader, we are right along side her.  Using a similar form to that of the repetitive and/or pivotal moments, she weaves repetitive imagery throughout.  One of these bittersweet threads is that of the patch, which shows itself often toward the end of chapter 3 and in the beginning of four.  A patch, already being such a sweet symbol, is first introduced during one of the dream sequences, page 79, when Carol offers a relieving back rub and takes Alison's pants to mend a hole.  The following two pages offer a strangely disjointed story about her mother patching a pair of her pants when she was young.  The story runs simultaneous to readings from Jung.  Then on 109, a small patch is seen and mentioned on a childhood dress that Alison possesses as an adult.  The dress too, has been a repeating image in the recent pages, although she doesn't tell us it's significance until it then, on page 109.  Finally, on page 119, the opening scene of the fourth chapter, Alison is seen, in another dream sequence, standing boldly in a pair of pants covered in patches.

This text was so rich, richer than "Fun Home," which some may remember had me wanting to lick the pages.  I've only scratched the surface of a very large and laborious fruit, I can't wait for Tuesdays class discussion.