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  • Published: 28 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448182176
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

Are You My Mother?




An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from 'one of the finest cartoonists at work today'.


An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven.

Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

'As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual. Sunday Times
'It's a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens - and frames things in such a way that you can't help but re-examine your own relationships, too.' Stylist

  • Published: 28 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448182176
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, People among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Also by Alison Bechdel

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Praise for Are You My Mother?

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are the kind of head-spinningly thoughtful and textured works that make you rejoice in the comic-book form.

Daily Telegraph

I emotionally lost myself in this book… It made me realise that people aren’t always perfect.

Tavi Gevinson, ELLE

It’s a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens – and frames things in such a way that you can’t help but re-examine your own relationships, too.

Emily Reynolds, Stylist

Are You My Mother? is a work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.

Jonathan Safran Foer

A complex, fascinating and intellectually rich memoir.

Larushka Ivan-Zadek, Metro

As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual.

Robert Collins, Sunday Times

Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

New York Times

Don’t let the cartoons fool you, this is an exciting and intelligent book and, at many points, highly moving. It doesn’t just tell Alison’s story, Are You My Mother? allows to you to think about your own.

Emerald Street

Find everything this author has written. Every jot she makes on the paper enriches the baroque, painful, exhilarating story she has to tell.

Candia McWilliam, Scotsman

It’s first and foremost funny, using graphical and verbal tricks to express the psychological dramas of an American household.

MacUser

Lively, fresh and expressive…humane, complex and beautiful.

Anna Carey, Irish Times

Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this, sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it - and you must!

Gloria Steinem

One of the chief pleasures of this book is how the words and pictures collaborate to gesture at a territory that neither might reach alone.

Tim Martin, Telegraph

Pure bliss.

Lisa Appiganesi, Observer

Throughout, there are magnificent feats of connectivity, startlingly complex internal monologues that unfold with perfect simplicity… I haven’t encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.

Rev’d Katie Roiphe, Scotsman

Very original and arresting.

Cressida Connelly, Spectator