Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader (London Review of Books to Star Magazine); music lover (opera to death metal); passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

The result is a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother – to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.