I really, really, really wanted to read Are You My Mother? (by Alison Bechdel) immediately after finishing her "tragicomic" (and other memoir), Fun Home. I put it on hold at the library immediately after I finished, and began my anxiously wait for it to arrive. Although it was probably only like four or five days, it seemed like forever, and (as I mentioned in my last post) I went and picked up more books in the interim. (I was probably seen by the librarians as some weird college kid, who had nothing better to do than search the "Holds" shelf and walk around picking up and putting down books. I was really hoping that it had come in already, and they hadn't had the chance to email me about it.)
Are You My Mother? centers on Bechdel's complex relationship with her mother. It's longer than Fun Home, and is acknoledged by Bechdel to have begun long before her father's story. It's a long, complex narrative involving psychoanalysis, therapy, feminism, and sexuality. And really, that's just the beginning. This book was way harder for me to read than Fun Home - I was able to knock out Fun Home within a few hours, whereas with Mother took me multiple readings of working my way through it, carefully going over the dialogue, trying to digest ideas and theories that are way above me. Not to mention vocabulary that just... went by me. It was like a wind tunnel, and I was trying to grab at ideas in order to make Bechdel's story make sense.
Not to say that Bechdel didn't do a good job with this graphic novel; on the contrary, she composed a perfect companion piece to Fun Home. The fact that her mother is still living, and that their relationship is still unfolding, means that she does not have the luxury of having the years between her father's suicide and her writing the book to reflect and examine him. In any case, both books seem to have taken multiple years to complete. (Maybe a decade in total? I have no idea.)
It's kind of frustrating for me to admit that this book might be more advanced than me; often I found that I was comparing myself to Bechdel while I was reading the book. I compared what we're reading, writing, drawing, listening to... what we're aware of, quite simply. Whether or not she was the same age as me when I was making the comparison is of no consequence. The sad competition still remains; I acknowledge that Bechdel is superior, not only being older than me, but also more worldly. She has obviously done more than her fair share of research in terms of psychology terms, and such. She mentions how (for a time), all she seemed to do was go to therapy, read about it, and write about it. Her experience serves her well; she knows her stuff, and is probably an expert in her own right.
(I've tried to get that last bit right, and hopefully it came off ok; I just really admire Bechdel, and I want that to come through in this not-quite-a-review.)
While I will probably try to read Mother again at some point in the future (when I feel more prepared, haha), I'm ready to return it to the library. I feel like this book is one where I need distance from it in order to cultivate my appreciation of it (ha!).
Since finishing, I've been researching Bechdel, and was surprised to find out that she is the person behind the Bechdel Test.
For those of you who don't know, the Bechdel Test is a series of criteria used to test gender bias in fiction (usually movies). To pass the test, the work must contain (1) two female characters who (2) talk to each other (3) about something other than a man.
As Sarkeesian states above, it isn't about whether or not a movie is feminist, but merely reveals gender biases in film. Although what this test reveals is a bit frustrating (here is a list of movies that do/don't pass the test*), I still think it's kind of cool that Bechdel is kind of the reason behind it. I'm kind of nerding out about this because I've only recently learned about the Bechdel test, so it's (for me) a way of connecting the "real world" and books. I guess having stuff like that, not-really "coincidences," is something that happens in the real world? Haha I need to get out more.
(No, really)
Hopefully I will have another piece up before next Thursday, but we'll see!
-M
*Although admittedly, this list is subjective to the viewer.
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