Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama
by: Bechdel, Alison

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 290 pages, illustrated in b&w and reddish tones by Bechdel. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 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, music lover, 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 good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the 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.