49 pages • 1 hour read
Alison BechdelAre You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Ordinary Devoted Mother”
Chapter 1 opens with a dream Alison has where she traps herself in a basement while moving plywood. The only way out is through a window with a spider crawling on it. She then notices a door leading to a large brook with submerged steppingstones. With little hesitation, Alison jumps into the water and experiences “a sublime feeling of surrender” (3).
While driving, Alison worries about her mother’s reaction to Fun Home, a comic memoir about her father, Bruce, as it discusses subjects like his closeted bisexuality. She compares this anxiety to the feelings she had when preparing to tell her mother she was a lesbian, or when she waited six months before telling Helen she had gotten her first period. A near accident with a truck that mirrors her father’s apparent suicide quells Alison’s concern. Helen allows the memoir to be written but refuses to help and hopes it isn’t too angry.
Helen’s psychiatrist boyfriend, Bob, tells Alison that the water in her dream is favorable for creativity. While writing Are You My Mother?, Alison experiences a similar dream where she is afraid to dive into water in order to exit a cave. While Alison considers it a positive sign, she wants to restart the book—even though it is five months late—as she’s “writing around something” (15).
To capture her mother’s voice, Alison transcribes their phone calls, saying little as Helen discusses mundane topics like swimsuits, Sylvia Plath’s therapy, Lady Gaga, and a friend’s granddaughter’s first period. This represents a role reversal; as a child, Alison had obsessive-compulsive disorder and her mother would write down her diary entries while Alison dictated.
At times, Helen provides constructive criticism that shapes Alison’s stringent internal editor. Helen feels that the first draft of Are You My Mother? is incohesive and quietly resents Alison’s need for approval. Helen also thinks Fun Home should have been a fictional story to protect the family’s reputation. Alison believes that she thinks more about Helen than Helen does of her, relating this to modernist author Virginia Woolf writing To the Lighthouse long after the death of her mother as a way to cope with unresolved issues.
Alison regularly goes to therapy and psychoanalysis sessions. Most of her visits are with two practitioners: Jocelyn in Minnesota during her 20s, and Carol in Vermont for the past 10 years. Now 45, Alison talks to Carol about her creative frustrations and how they coincide with her onset menopause. In an earlier conversation with Jocelyn, she reveals a childhood fascination with disabled children and a game where she pretended to be disabled so Helen could fix her.
Alison is also obsessed with Donald Woods Winnicott, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis and a contemporary of Woolf, to the point that she tells Carol that she wants him to be her mother. As Alison examines a series of pictures of her as a three-month-old baby with her mother, she relates them to Winnicott’s paper “The Ordinary Devoted Mother.” In the pictures, Alison mimics Helen’s expressions until she notices her father holding the camera. Alison notes that by three months of age, she already is aware of Bruce’s temper and that the photos were taken around the time her mother became pregnant again. Winnicott observes that after childbirth, most mothers devote themselves to their children. If not, it is usually because the mother dies, becomes pregnant, or suffers depression. However, she disagrees with Winnicott’s assessment that the mother-child relationship is not mystical, as the feeling of unity between two beings is transcendent.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Are You My Mother? has a non-linear narrative that can be challenging to follow for readers as Bechdel jumps between several points in her life. In addition, the book’s creation is also part of the narrative. The graphic novel format facilitates this stream-of-consciousness format. Bechdel names each chapter after one of Winnicott’s research areas. All chapters begin with a dream and end with a small letterbox panel on a black double-page spread, serving as related bookends. Finally, the work focuses on several relationships—not only Alison’s relationship with her biological mother, but also with her therapists, her romantic partners, intellectual inspirations, and her hypercritical internal self.
The first dream of the chapter relates to the act of writing a memoir. Alison becomes trapped in her emotional problems and must escape through a web-covered window, which represents her mother, before willingly submerging herself into the water as a way to explore her past. A similar dream appears later in the chapter as Alison works on Are You My Mother?, and its abrupt ending correlates with her writer’s block.
Alison’s relationship with her mother is emotionally distant and confrontational. Alison asks her mother for permission before writing about her father. Helen wants to be left out of the creative process, but Alison records their conversations and requests her critiques. The two sharply disagree on memoir as a genre: The mother sees it as invasive and self-indulgent, while the daughter sees all literature as autobiographical. The chapter also depicts two childhood events that reflect Helen’s caring nature—when she writes her daughter’s diary and indulges her feigned disabilities.
In addition, Bechdel establishes her relationships with two therapists, Jocelyn and Carol, and notes the difference between therapy and psychoanalysis: Therapy, where the patient normally sits up, focuses on short-term symptom relief. Psychoanalysis, where the patient lies down, addresses the source of mental health problems. Alison states that the latter positioning allows for an unrestricted access of the unconscious.
Chapter 1 introduces several visual motifs that occur throughout the book. The first are the excepts from writings by Winnicott and Woolf. With their serif fonts and highlighted sections, they mirror textbook pages and fit in with the book’s meta structure. Alison imagines the two figures passing each other in London’s Tavistock Square, unaware of their future connections: Woolf’s publisher would one day release Winnicott’s papers.
Bechdel also uses juxtaposition, in which the narration discusses one topic while the artwork depicts something else to suggest a connection. One example is the set of baby photos. The realistically drawn pictures lay strewn across her art supplies as Alison describes their context and Winnicott’s theories. Helen’s banal monologue about Lady Gaga and Sylvia Plath plays out alongside these explanations, showing the reader her tendency to dominate conversations and jump between topics.
While Bechdel admires Winnicott, she ends the chapter by challenging his theory that the baby mimicking the mother is more an act of utility than magic. This shows that she is willing to challenge her sources and come to her own conclusions. The ending frame is on the word “child” in Helen’s transcribed complaint that her friend’s granddaughter getting her first period means “she won’t be a child anymore” (35-37). This calls back to Alison’s reluctance to inform her mom of her first period as well as her current issues with menopause, but later sections demonstrate how a psychological childhood can continue long after physical milestones.
