It’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

Here’s some questions:

Are you??

Does this book pass the Bechdel test? Yes, overwhelmingly.

Also, say the title of the book with the emphasis that makes the most sense to you.

ARE you my mother?

Are YOU my mother?

Are you MY mother?

Are you my MOTHER?

All of these work for this book. This is a follow-up memoir after Fun Home, that is a mature and interesting work, but one that’s also less successful and ultimately less memorable. This book follows more so along the lines of an almost autofiction kind of graphic novel more so than a straight out memoir text. There’s a lot of personal pain, personal, conversations, and reflections on psychological and philosophical texts like Ecrits by Lacan and books by Adam Philips, and I am gracious that this book is not a discussion of those texts, but instead involving a woman who is using those text to try to work through meaning.

What this book does really well, and something like a LOT of books do poorly is use and reflect on the use of dreams. Dreams in fiction are dicey. Because of the nature of fiction, the construction of narrative already require a certain kind of suspension of reality to believe that the constructed world of the novel or story functions along its own rules. And so the addition of dreams to this tension and relationship with the audience can be awkward, as so many uses of dreams are vulgar and inelegant.

This book uses them quite effectively.

Here’s another movie of good dreams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3n4TxNeaPg

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Are-You-My-Mother-Comic/dp/0618982507/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1548251471&sr=8-5&keywords=are+you+my+mother+hardcover)