Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

Alison sends a draft of Fun Home to her mother, who likes some sections but finds it confusing and scandalous. The critique leaves Alison distraught. She dreams of climbing an island of ice that turns into her childhood home, and then unsuccessfully explaining the situation to Bruce and a neighbor.

Alison’s parents are open about sexual topics like the Oedipus complex and penis envy, but Helen avoids using the word “vagina”. According to feminist poet Adrienne Rich, women writers, even Woolf, often emulate the formality of admired male poets and appear in writings as objects instead of multifaceted subjects. One of Helen’s poems is a twist on “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, a ballad by English poet John Keats describing an encounter between a knight and a fairy. In Helen’s version, the poem is told from the perspective of the woman.

In his article “Hate in the Countertransference,” Winnicott writes that the mother loves her children, but may despise the thankless work of parenting. They must be honest about this hate, as Winnicott is when he takes care of an angry runaway. He places the boy outside whenever he acts out and calmly expresses his anger at him. Likewise, psychoanalysts must acknowledge their hatred, or Countertransference, for a patient.

After graduating from college, Alison moves to New York City and submits a story about the time she dirtied her pants with grass stains in an attempt to get her mother’s attention to two literary journals. Rich is one of the editors, and she sends a rejection criticizing its lack of substance. Alison takes the advice to heart. Meanwhile, she publishes her cartoons at a feminist newspaper and obtains a book deal. She tells her mother, but Helen believes that cartoons about lesbians are limiting and wants her to use a penname. Alison believes that this pushback is more about Bruce’s sexuality than hers, but this is just one part of the “emotional gulf” between them (182).

Alison meets Eloise, an antiwar activist. The two visit a lecture by Rich, where she discusses her time spent in Nicaragua protesting American intervention. Alison is more interested in Rich’s comments on poetry’s patriarchal orthodoxy and her own evolution as a poet. Rich’s talk that night becomes the basis for her essay “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” and Alison links it to Woolf’s views on the obstacles for women creatives in “A Room of One’s Own”—the one Woolf work that Helen has read.

Alison contrasts her quickly intimate romance with Eloise with Winnicott’s sex-less marriage to wife Alice. During World War II, he meets social worker Claire Britton, and they eventually become lovers and collaborators. After the death of his father, Winnicott leaves his wife, stands up to his controlling mentor and supervisor Melanie Klein, and marries Claire. He also finds the confidence to write his paper on the transitional object.

Eloise travels to Nicaragua, and Alison sends her mother a piece from her memoir on how she stops kissing her goodnight. Helen’s critique is impersonal but also includes a confession of jealousy about her daughter’s potential fame, which chills Alison’s desire to write the book about her father for 17 years.

In one of Bruce’s letters, he asks an angry Helen to help with a graduate school paper on Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan woman considered to be the first American poet. Helen purchase Bradstreet’s “Love Lyrics” and attends a class, but Bruce writes the paper himself and later quits over his mediocre performance. When researching Bradstreet, Alison discovers two Rich essays on her: a detached scholarly assessment, and one discussing their shared struggles as women.

After Fun Home’s release, Helen tells Alison she feels betrayed by the book’s inclusion of their private conversations and expresses her distaste towards overly personal writing. She regrets ending her education after grad school, saying she could’ve been a poetry critic such as Helen Vendler. Alison tries to explain that personal stories can be universal, but Helen ignores her. In “The Child in the Family Group,” Winnicott remarks that children must engage in disloyalty to separate from their parents.