Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

"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, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated

"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

"This book is not so much the sequel to Alison Bechdel’s captivating memoir Fun Home, as the maternal yin to its paternal yang. Bravely worrying out the snarled web of missed connections that bedevil her relationship with her remarkable mother from the very start, Bechdel deploys everyone from Virginia Woolf to D.W. Winnicott (the legendary psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie the snares of a fraught past. She arrives, at long last, at something almost as shimmering as it is simple: a grace-flecked accommodation and an affirming love."—Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences and Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative

"A psychologically complex, ambitious, illuminating successor to the author’s graphic-memoir masterpiece." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[Bechdel's] lines and angles are sharper than in Fun Home, and yet her self-image and her views of family members, lovers, and analysts are thorough, clear, and kind. Mothers, adult daughters, literati, memoir fans, and psychology readers are among the many who will find this outing a rousing experience . . . This may be the most anticipated graphic novel of the year." —Booklist, starred review

"A fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Are You My Mother? offers an improbably profound master class in how to live an examined life . . . More moving and illuminating than Fun Home." —Elle

"The best writers, whether they are creating fiction or nonfiction, are trying to find out what makes people human for better and for worse. A taut, complex book within several books, Bechdel’s investigation of her relationship with her mother and the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offers the most articulate answer you’re likely to ingest. You’ll feel like Alice climbing your way out the jagged rabbit hole to limbo." —Library Journal

A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year

“Complex, funny, and ultimately affirming, the book is another masterpiece of graphic storytelling.”—Boston Globe  

In this brilliantly told graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning her complex relationship with her mother—a voracious reader and passionate amateur actor, a woman whose creative aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel’s childhood.  

As Bechdel grapples with having become the artist her mother wanted to be, she takes readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to her own adult love life. Ultimately, though, she comes back to Mother and their fragile, poignant truce.  

“Magnificent . . . Bechdel’s triumph is not just that she’s emerged from her tunnel, with weary but clear eyes, but that she’s brought her mother with her.”—Entertainment Weekly