Book recommendation of the year

[tim]

"If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body."

Just finished reading Alison Bechdel's new (okay, not all that new, but I'm behind the times) graphic memoir _Are You My Mother?_. DTWOF was, of course, awesome; I enjoyed _Fun Home_; but this one is her best work, IMO. I hope she writes many more books that are as personal and insightful.

Comments

[rymenhild]

Can you tell me why you like Are You My Mother so much? I wanted to like it much more than I did like it.

[tim]

Sure! Well, a big part of it for me is that I saw a lot of similarities with my own life. Bechdel's mother didn't come off as being exactly like my mother, but a lot of how she talked about sort of searching for relationships as an adult to replace or compensate for the connection that wasn't there when she was a child resonated with me. As well, the idea that she talks about both in the context of psychological theory and in her own life of developing a false self -- specifically insofar as falling in love with your own intellect in the absence of that kind of all-consuming relationship with a parent when you're a child -- was something I really related to. The very last page of the book really hit me hard. It helped that I'd read _The Drama of the Gifted Child_ before, so some of the ideas were already floating around in my head but she pulled them together in a really good way.

Of course, it wasn't just that the story was relatable for me, but also that I liked the way she told it and in general, I appreciated the mix of personal experiences with therapy (something that doesn't seem to get talked about much outside of online support circles) and contextualizing those experiences with reference to literature of various kinds.

Dunno if that clarifies things any :-) Of course, there's no accounting for taste... and no doubt, I didn't relate to _Fun Home_ as much given that I don't have a father. I often think about how little I see my own life reflected in anything I read (again, talking about published books and not stuff people write online, which is not to devalue the latter!) and while there are obvious things about my life that are really different from Bechdel's (she's cis, and had two parents...), I still saw more of my experience reflected in the book than almost anything else I've read.

[lindseykuper]

I think I liked Fun Home better because it was more of a page-turner, but I thought both were great.