Book Club Collection: 'Are You My Mother? : A Comic Drama' by Alison Bechdel

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.

A New York Times, USA Today, and Time Best Book of the Year

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.

Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother — to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
(Summary provided by the publisher)

Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For became a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the planet. And her more recent, darkly humorous graphic memoirs about her family have forged an unlikely intimacy with an even wider range of readers.

Bechdel self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-five years, from 1983 to 2008. The award-winning generational chronicle has been called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” (Ms. magazine)

In 2006 she published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Time magazine named it the Best Book of 2006. It was adapted into a musical by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori. It opened on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater on April 19, 2015,  and won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.”

In her work, Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres, the relationship of the self to the world outside. Her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama delved into not just her relationship with her own mother, but the theories of the 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her most recent book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (May 2021), continues her investigation of the relationship between inside and outside, in this case the outside where she skis, bikes, hikes, and wanders in pursuit of fitness and, incidentally, self-transcendence.

Alison’s comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. She lives up a hill in Vermont.

American cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel gained fame for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). One particular cartoon, 1985's “The Rule,” spawned the Bechdel test, a metric that evaluates movies on the basis of gender inequality.
Alison Bechdel (born September 10, 1960, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American cartoonist and graphic novelist best known for the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008)—which introduced the so-called Bechdel test, a metric that evaluates movies on the basis of gender inequality—and the graphic memoir Fun Home (2006).

Early life
Bechdel’s parents—Bruce and Helen (Fontana) Bechdel—were teachers, and her father was a part-time funeral director (the funeral home was nicknamed the “fun home” by Bechdel and her siblings). When Bechdel was 19 years old, just months after she had revealed to her parents that she is a lesbian, her father was struck and killed by a truck, an event that Bechdel later theorized was actually an act of suicide. After she earned a B.A. (1981) from Oberlin College, she moved to New York City.

Dykes to Watch Out For and the Bechdel test
In 1983 Bechdel began writing and drawing Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic strip that soon became a mainstay in gay and alternative news weeklies across the United States. Dykes to Watch Out For ran for 25 years, with Bechdel self-syndicating the strip and eventually publishing it on the Internet. There the strip gained new life, and one particular cartoon would embed Bechdel’s name in the popular culture lexicon. In the 1985 strip “The Rule,” a character states that she will watch a movie only if it has at least two women who talk to each other about a topic other than men. In the 21st century those guidelines became known as the Bechdel test, a shorthand method to illustrate the dramatic gender disparity in Hollywood. (Bechdel herself preferred to call it the Bechdel-Wallace test to acknowledge Liz Wallace, the friend who inspired “The Rule”).

Bechdel published a number of Dykes to Watch Out For printed collections, and although the strip’s main character bears a passing resemblance to her, the comic is not overtly autobiographical. The series ended in 2008.

Fun Home
In 2006 Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home, a coming-of-age story that details her relationship with her father, a closeted gay man with an obsessive eye for decorative detail, and her own emerging lesbian consciousness. The critically acclaimed work was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it won the Eisner—the most-prestigious award in the comics industry—for best reality-based work.

In October 2013 Fun Home was brought to the stage by Lisa Kron (book) and Jeanine Tesori (score, with Kron). It captured a string of awards during its Off-Broadway run, and in 2014 it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The musical made its Broadway debut in April 2015, and it went on to garner a dozen Tony Award nominations, winning for best musical, best actor, best direction, best book, and best score.

Other graphic novels and memoirs
In 2012 Bechdel released Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, a graphic novel that explores the mother-child bond through Bechdel’s relationship with her own mother, as well as the writings of Virginia Woolf and psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott. Two years later Bechdel was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” In 2021 she published her first book in nearly 10 years, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. In the graphic memoir, Bechdel explores her interest in fitness crazes while addressing such issues as body image, interdependence, and mortality.

She published Spent in 2025, a gently satirical graphic novel about aging progressives living in Vermont. The novel features a protagonist named Alison (who became famous for writing a comic strip titled Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For) and characters from Bechdel’s earlier works. The New York Times said of Spent’s “lovable but almost transcendently annoying” characters, “their frustration feels like a reassurance to readers who share it, and perhaps a gentle reminder that it’s easy to confuse being socially conscious with being self-serious.”

Personal life
In 2015 Bechdel married artist Holly Rae Taylor, who did the coloring for The Secret to Superhuman Strength and Spent.
(Biography provided by the author and Encyclopedia Britannica)