“Are You My Mother? is a work of the most
00 / Higher in Canada
is the author of the
best-selling memoir Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book
of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly,
the New York Times, People, USA Today,
the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice,
and the San Francisco Chronicle, among
others. For twenty-five years, she wrote
and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch
Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life,
queer and otherwise, considered “one of
the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre,
period” (Ms.). Bechdel was the guest editor
of The Best American Comics 2011 and has
drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, En-
tertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New
© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
York Times Book Review.
Jacket art © Alison Bechdel
Jacket design by Christopher Moisan
Author photograph © Elena Seibert
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
www.hmhbooks.com
Bechdel_AYMM?_jacket_mech.indd 1
$22.
humane kind of genius, bravely going right
to the heart of things: why we are who we
are. It’s also incredibly funny. And visually
stunning. And page-turningly addictive.
And heartbreaking.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, author of
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and
Everything Is Illuminated
“Many of us are living out the unlived lives
of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a
graphic novel about this, sort of like a comic
book by Virginia Woolf. You won’t believe
it until you read it — and you must!”
— Gloria Steinem
“Bravely worrying out the snarled web of
missed connections that bedevil her relationship
with her remarkable mother from the very
start, Bechdel deploys everyone from Virginia
Woolf to D. W. Winnicott (the legendary
psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve
as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie
the snares of a fraught past. She arrives, at long
last, at something almost as shimmering as it is
simple: a grace-flecked accommodation and
an affirming love.”
— Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything
That Rises: A Book of Convergences and
Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative
$22.00 / higher in canada
ISBN 978-0-618-98250-9
1449884
1025613
From the best-selling author of
Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1
Book of the Year, a brilliantly told
graphic memoir of how Alison
Bechdel became the artist her
mother wanted to be
lison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a
pop-culture and literary phenome-
non. 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 artis-
tic 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, hi-
lariously, 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 illu-
minating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s
own (serially monogamous) adult love life.
And, finally, back to Mother — to a truce,
fragile and in real time, that will move and
astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
0512
2/13/12 12:35 PM
Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 3 3/7/12 12:48 PM
 FOR my mother,
who knows who she is.

Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-0-618-98250-9

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

“Liaisons” from A Little Night Music. Words and music by Stephen Sondheim © 1973 (renewed)
Rilting Music, Inc. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

“The Glamorous Life” from the film version of A Little Night Music.
Words and music by Stephen Sondheim © 1973 (renewed) Rilting Music, Inc. All rights administered
by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 4 3/7/12 12:48 PM

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 while engaged in some sort of home-
improvement project, I inadvertently
block my exit from a dank celLar.

I start to panic.

the only way out is to squeEze

through the smalL, spidery window.

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 10 3/7/12 12:48 PM

 I walk along the broOk, loOking for a place to crosS.

The stepping stones

are underwater.

the pOol is deep and murky.

it’s warm out. I’m not wearing I have some concern
anything I need to worRy about about the dirty water...
getTing wet.

..but this only slightly diminishes

a sublime feEling of surRender.

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 11 3/7/12 12:48 PM

 mom...

this story begins when I began to tell I had the dream about the broOk right
another story. before I told my mother I was writing
a memoir about my father.

...I have
something to
telL you.

mom, I want to
telL you some-
thing.

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 12 3/7/12 12:48 PM

 the emotion of the dream stuck with me for days. I had gotTen myself out of a
dead place and plunged with blind trust into a vital, sensuous one.

okay. then
she’lL say,
“what?” and I’lL
say...

what? what
will you say,
alison?

you smarmy,
self-indulgent,
solipsistic piece
of shit.

okay.
I’ll say, “I’m
writing a boOk and
about dad.” she’lL say,
“whaaaat?!!”

I’d had some practice in telL-

ing my mother diFficult things.

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 13 3/7/12 12:48 PM

 I felt kind of like I did twenty years and kind of like I did five years be-
earlier, when I was preparing to telL fore that, when I was working up the
her I was a lesbian. courage to telL her I’d gotTen my first
period. that had taken me six months.

why am I
telLing her okay, so she might
at all? freak out at first,
but then she’lL
say, “why?”

this story-–a memoir about my mother-–could begin with either of those scenes.

uhH...it’s ... and

just something she’lL say,
I neEd to do. “why?”

I want to give
him a proper funeral.
I want to telL
the truth.

but as I consider moving the begin- ...I seE that perhaps the real problem
Ning further back in time, before the with this memoir about my mother is
coming out, before the first period... that it has no beginNing.

yeah. his
“the bisexuality, the
truth?!” suicide. you don’t
mind, do you?

Bechdel_AreYouMyMother?_fulltext.indd 14 3/7/12 12:48 PM

 sort of like how I’d understoOd human reproduction as a child. I was an egG in-
side my mother when she was stilL an egG inside her mother, and so forth and so on.

a dizZying, infinite regresS. I don’t want to

hurt you But I have
to do this.

there’s a certain relief in

knowing that I am a terminus.

even if I’d ever

had the slightest
urge to reproduce,
it’s toO late now.
I’m runNing out I hope that in
of eGgs. time you’ll come
to understand...
my clockworklike
menstrual cycle
skipPed its first
beat the very weEk,
in my forty-fifth
year, that I sat
down to begin
writing about my
mother.

of course, the point at which I began you can’t live and write at the same time.
to write the story is not the same as
the point at which the story begins.

oh, that’s goOd.

sanctimonious and
patronizing.

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