Her statement to one of them about her inability to write unless she gets her mother out of her head and the concomitant admission that the only way to get her out of her head is to write the book, presents the Catch-22 and raison d’être of this work.īechdel and her character Alison are also steeped in the literature of both feminist theory and liberation in fact, when she alludes to Virginia Woolf or Adrienne Rich, or explores her need for creating art, this novel achieves some of the power of her earlier work. She is drawn mainly to the work of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and to Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child, and there are many scenes here with Alison in therapy with a variety of therapists. In addition, Bechdel’s use of other literary and psychoanalytic works is less wide ranging here and doesn’t have the resonant quality so remarkable in Fun Home. Sadly, for the reader, the mother-daughter relationship is not as engaging as the father-daughter interaction was in the earlier work. In this new graphic memoir, Bechdel spends most of the book exploring her relationship with her mother and a variety of female lovers and female therapists. That remarkable work was filled with literary allusions (her father was a high school English teacher) and revelations about the family dynamic. ISBN 9780618982509Īlison Bechdel made an auspicious entrance on the literary scene with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, in which she excavates her relationship with her father.
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