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.

Miriam Katin: Letting it Go

I've long been a fan of comics in novel or memoir form and so I was really happy when Drawn & Quarterly contacted us about doing an event at the Festival with Miriam Katin's new book, Letting it Go. Katin was born during WWII in Hungary but her work simmers with youthful and contemporary rhythms.

In Letting it Go, the author/artist (the book is a memoir) is confronted with her fears and anger, traumas from her past which centre around Berlin after her grown son informs her that he is moving there with his girlfriend. The book unfolds in these emotional bursts as Katin works through all her charged feelings that linger from her experience as a young girl, her prejudices against the city, her worries for her son.

It's beautifully drawn with a (what seems to me) intentionally amateur style (almost like it was taken directly from a sketchbook and publishes), naive, blunt coloured pencil drawings and no panels. But in the pages are gorgeous sketches of New York, of Berlin, of the past, and one gets a real sense of Katin's personality and her contemporary life as a New Yorker.

I am really excited that we can host Miriam for the book party at Blue Met. Her event, which will also feature Drawn & Quarterly Editor-in-Chief, Chris Oliveros, will be held at Hotel 10 on April 28 at 1:00 p.m.

And, hey, hey, it's free to attend!

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...