Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel

I finally got around to reading Alison Bechdel's latest book, Are You My Mother? Interesting read. Not quite as engaging or as emotionally appealing as her last book Fun Home but I still found it to be enjoyable.

The book explores Bechdel's relationship with her mother and the years of therapy she had

to endure in order to come to some kind of truce with her feelings about her. A few things stand out: Bechdel's social anxiety (not that uncommon in writers and something you get a real sense of when you see Bechdel on stage), her OCD tendencies and how they manifest themselves as an adult, the vibrance and intelligence of her mother and their (at times) fraught relationship.

The book is a testament to how literature can affect our lives: Bechdel reads Virginia Woolf's diaries and compares her own relationship to her mother (and father in parts) and Woolf's feelings about her own parents. I love these kinds of meditations on literature which give literature a role to play in understanding our lives. Bechdel is also obsessed with psychiatrist Donald Winicott (a contemporary of Woolf and of Freud) and tries hard, too, to see her own mother issues by considering them through Winicott's theories on subject, object,  attachment, and true self. To me this is where the book breaks down somewhat, particularly in this day and age when so much of psychoanalysis has little cultural impact or is seen as being somewhat anachronistic.

One wonders, too, about why Bechdel seems so self-absorbed at times: as if her relationship with her own mother means something to all her readers (a short riff/discussion on the personal being universal and vice versa doesn't justify what is, essentially, her need to answer questions that not answerable in relation to her mother, her own identity, her damaged adult-hood, her troubled love life, her tendency to over identify with her therapists, etc.).

But it's a great read and the kind of book whose universe I missed when I wasn't in it. Bechdel's own vision of herself is so clearly defined and articulated and her mother is a character that is fully developed.

The need to understand her relationship with her father never caused any pause in Fun Home. There was trauma, pain, and, of course, his ultimate suicide at an age when most people are vulnerable to psychological damage. But after reading Are You My Mother and witnessing similar questions turned around in an obsessive and not wholly healthy way,  I am curious now what Bechdel will do next, how she will move past these self-absorbed questions and externalize her gifts again as she did with her long-running column, Dykes to Watch Out For (though she claims that much of the action was based on her own life and the lives of her friends).

Alison Bechdel in Montreal

The other day I saw a young woman reading Are You My Mother on the metro and I wanted to grab her and say: "Hey, did you hear that Alison Bechdel will be in Montreal soooooooon?"

I didn't, of course. And for all I know, she was the one who arranged it (maybe she works for McGill University, one of the sponsor's of Bechdel's appearances).

But I am really looking forward to seeing Bechdel again. I've written about her before here, of course. Her books are a revelation and more than that, show how powerful the graphic novel/memoir/comic books (whatever) can be.

For any fans of the graphic memoir, you'll be in for a treat. But for anyone who doesn't "get it" and hasn't quite gotten on board with the way visuals and text can beautifully sit alongside one another on the page, I highly encourage you to check out Bechdel. It'll change the way you think about what "reading" means...

Sponsored by Drawn & Quarterly, she's here on Friday, April 12 at 7 p.m. in Mile End.

One of the best parts of the deal is that ticket purchase gives you $5 off her books.

Guy Delisle and his travels

Getting back into the swing of things after reading only sporadically the last month. Well, not sporadically, I read every day but no 2 hours lounging around in my favourite chair in the evenings or falling into a book all weekend.

The last week, been pretty much reading only Guy Delisle. Delisle is one of the stars of Graphic Fiction/Memoir and his style: straightforward, almost non-lyrical - belies the more flowery approach (in terms of language and drawing style) of graphic memoirists such as Alison Bechdel. But I have been loving his books. I came across this trove of his books a few weeks back: Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, his two early works, Burma Chronicles. His new one, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City comes out in April.

Delisle's North Korea book traces a few months he spent there as an animator (and, in fact, his descriptions of the process of animating a TV show are just as compelling as the bizarre cultish world of Kim Jong Il's people), his relationships with his guides and translators as well as other animators and foreigners working in Pyongyang. What an amazing opportunity and what an amazing experience to capitalize on. Delisle keeps a certain distance from his reader, he doesn't go into enormous details of his past or his emotional reactions to certain things on an individual level (though he certainly reacts as a normal human would to the bizarre universe of modern North Korea).

His early works are interesting but contain very little language (even at his most verbose, Delisle is not a writer in the way Bechdel is but an artist, his language straightforward and not often loaded with subtext) but are amusing if a little bizarre at times. They are also quite funny though these are works that can be read (and re-read) in a single sitting. It's funny to see how his earlier works contain the germ that he would bring to his more complex travel chronicles.

I am just starting his Shenzhen book and I am looking forward to seeing what he does with it in China, a country I have a long association with. Maybe one of these days he'll make it to Japan and write about it though he'll need a lot longer than three months to really make any sense of it...

Powell's Booty...

So back from my trip out west and here is my booty from Powell's. I had to limit myself to one short trip so I wouldn't go crazy! For those of you who don't know Powell's, I'd say any trip out to the Pacific NW requires a trip to Portland in order to see the place, what has to be one of the largest bookstores in the world. One unique and excellent thing about this place is that they put the used and new copies of the books on the same shelves so it's always your choice which to buy. There are countless rooms on several floors and stacks all the way to the ceiling. Anyone who reads is in heaven!

At any rate, here is what I nabbed:

Alison Bechdel: Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For

So I've written twice recently about Alison Bechdel and because they didn't have her latest memoir, I decided to stock up on one of her cartoon strip anthologies. This will be a fast read...

Jenny Erpenbeck: Visitation

Several people have recommended this book to me and I've had it on my list of books to buy for weeks. I plan to hole up this weekend and read this one cover to cover. It's a book about Berlin which should fit in nicely with a lot of the reading I've been doing lately.

Colm Tóibin: The South

One of my favorite writers. I've read just about all of his novels (The Master is one of my all time faves) and all were interesting in their own way. But this one I haven't read which means I have something new to look forward to next week!

So, yes, lately I've been reading a lot of international (i.e., non-Canadian) fiction. That's not by choice! Well, I guess in a way it is, but the truth of the matter is that I read Canadian writers' works most of the year, particularly starting in mid to late October when we start programming the Canadian literature part of our Festival. And that continues throughout the spring when the reading is done to catch up on all the writers coming (or as many as I can, at any rate).

Late summer to early fall is my time of year to read international fiction since it's the time of year when I am most aware of what international writers are doing.

Meanwhile, I am still reading Colum McCann's The Dancer. It's a great read so far but no time to read really (I have a hard time reading on airplanes...).

Portland, Wordstock and our 2013 Grand Prize Winner selected!

Wordstock was great! One reason I wanted to attend was to see the book fair aspect of it, a balance between literary events and publishers presenting their new catalogs.

Saw Peter Zuckerman talk about his book Buried in the Sky about the individual Sherpa trekkers who have been such integral partners in the development of the trekking `industry` in Nepal. He`s a compelling storyteller, too, and the audience was on the edges of their seats this afternoon as he told anecdotes from the book.

I then talked to people from several western presses and magazines and met some really great people.

Also saw Daniel H. Wilson in discussion and his book could be a real gem, as well. Haven`t read it but it seems interesting. Read a summary of it here.

Made it over to Powell`s and bought Jenny Erpenbeck`s Visitation, an Alison Bechdel anthology, and Ruth Stone`s In the Next Galaxy.

But the best news: got an email confirming our 2013 grand prize winner. It`s a great one, folks, and stay tuned until our press conference in March, 2013 where will announce this, some other exciting confirmed guests and exciting news about our upcoming Festival.

For those who don`t know yet: the 2013 Festival is scheduled for April 22nd until 28th at the OPUS Hotel.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Read this memoir last night and this morning on the plane flying back from NYC (though it's only a short flight, I managed to get through almost all of it).

It's lovely: moving, funny, and containing all kinds of fascinating literary allusions and references to Fitzgerald, Proust, Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few.

What emerges is a highly complex man (Bruce Bechdel, Alison's father) who is loving, stern, distant, manipulative, and conflicted. I have rarely felt that I understood a long-dead character from a book as I do now about him. His death at 44 seems doubly tragic in the consequences it has on a young girl, a traumatized family, and a man who never had the chance to live his life the way he needed to.

And as Bechdel herself noted at her performance Saturday at The New Yorker Festival, the book is as much a book about gender non-conformity as it is about twin tales a man who never has the chance to come out of the closet and a young girl's acceptance of her own lesbianism.

I highly recommend this book: even for those who don't think you enjoy graphic novels, there is a real insight here that the form allows Bechdel to delve into in a very unique way. Not only is her internal life presented here but "archival" evidence from her past, recreated here in graphic novel form: diaries, letters, police reports, telegrams, old photos. It's highly readable and immensely moving.

OK off to Thanksgiving dinner now. Happy holidays, everyone.

Alison Bechdel and Judith Thurman

As I noted a few posts ago, I am a big fan of comics (or graphic novels; I have such a hard time with which term to use). This afternoon I had the great opportunity to see two personalities I admire in conversation.

I came to Dykes to Watch Out For late in life: far after it had been syndicated across the country and just before its run ended in the late 2000s. I never read it regularly but I did end up finding an anthology a few years after its run that I quite enjoyed. It`s got a soap opera quality to it: like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk and R Crumb all rolled into one. It`s got a normalcy that easy to relate to yet for me it contains a distance that makes it compelling and exotic.

Are you my mother

Bechdel`s two post-Dykes memoirs are tales of her family: Fun Home about her father and the latest, Are You My Mother, about her relationship with her mother. Bechdel really pushes the limits of what graphic novels can and should do. As she noted in her discussion this afternoon, she is interested in how comics can represent the internal lives of characters (as they have so long been focused on action or external lives). And her works do what good movies do: tell stories in a way that you forget the form or the attractiveness of the medium and just let the story overtake you.

Thurman is an amazing writer though I wonder how well-suited she was to Alison Bechdel`s on stage personality. Bechdel leans toward being an introvert, it seems to me, and Thurman likes the cerebral idiom frequently: lots of questions that seemed to be to esoteric and far too psychological for the subject herself to address (questions of `the other`etc etc don`t seem to be very instructive when discussing comics with the artist. That`s not to suggest that Bechdel isn`t amazingly charming and bright but there is a highly pragmatic aspect to her approach as an interview subject).

Excellent questions from the audience: about color choices, about comics a form geared at a society becoming less (traditionally) literate, about the presence of Dykes in today`s queer culture.

Great show overall and I definitely have Bechdel`s two memoirs at the top of my reading list for the fall.

from Dykes to Watch Out For

New Yorker Festival

So I am off to New York this weekend for a few meetings and to catch a few events at the New Yorker Festival. They do some very interesting shows and, naturally, being in New York, get some of the best writers in the world.

I am looking forward to Faith: a conversation with Nathan Englander, Marilynne Robinson and Chris Adrian. I'm a big fan of Nathan Englander and I love his book The Ministry of Special Cases. And Marilynne Robinson's work is always raved about though I've only read Gilead. Home has been on my list for a few years now but I've still not managed to read it. There was such an interesting conversation going around about her work when Home was published: about faith today, about being an older female writer with a best-seller today, about being a literary writer in today's climate. At any rate, the three of them in conversation about Faith today.

Also looking forward to seeing Alison Bechdel and Judith Therman. Bechdel was all over the literosphere in the summer for her new memoir, Are You My Mother. She lives just across the border in Vermont (or has a place there, at any rate) and has been on our radar for a few years now. As noted in my last post, I'm a big fan of the comic/graphic novel, but I fear Alison Bechdel is a tough writer to land at this point in her career.

For those wondering why we don't always have writers like Bechdel and Robinson and Englander (though we try), as usual, it's a matter of $$. Writers who are currently being buzzed about are highly in demand and can get upwards of 60 invitations a week! A friend of mine (a well-known writer) says that after a while, one starts to feel a bit depressed and overwhelmed at so much attention so raising prices of speaking fees is the only way to determine which invitation is priority. I guess I get that...then agents get involved...it isn't pretty!

Unfortunately, what it means for a Festival like ours is that inviting big name writers with buzz in the literosphere can be pricey! Every year we try to bring at least a few if we can...

There are a few more shows on my list for the next few days and a few I wanted to see but couldn't make work because of other things going on in New York this weekend. But glad to have the chance to hang out in one of most favorite cities in the world for a few days.