Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

"Did you see Daniel Mendelson’s article on memoir in The New Yorker? […] It’s good. Isn’t he the one who beat you for that prize? […] Oh you know. Inaccuracy, exhibitionism, narcissism, those fake memoirs. […] Did I tell you I ordered that chlorine-resistant swimsuit? It costs a hundred dollars, but I go through several swimsuits a year. […] Well, I’m a poor widow too, and I don’t want to look at vinyl siding!”

Alison transcribes her phone conversations with Helen to capture her mother’s voice. It’s difficult for the author to talk with Helen during this, but it would be hard to regardless as most conversation topics are either gossip or sore spots, like Helen’s professional envy, that would invite an argument. Alison considers this the reversal of a childhood ritual of her mother writing her diary for her, which she compares to “persuading a hummingbird to perch on your finger” (13).

“My mother’s editorial voice—precisian, dispassionate, elegant, adverbless—is lodged deep in my temporal lobes. How I envy the involuntary torrent of words that came to Virginia Woolf that day in Tavistock Square.” 

Alison struggles with writing this book, believing that the original draft focuses too much on herself and that she is avoiding something. Helen’s critique is curt and to the point: “Ha! There are too many strands!” (15). Alison trusts her mother’s judgement despite their differences, but it also builds a stern internal critic that makes writing laborious, unlike the creative rush that leads Woolf to write the mentally liberating To the Lighthouse.

“Or a mother becomes depressed and she can feel herself depriving her child of what the child needs, but she cannot help the onset of her mood swing, […] there are all manner of reasons why some children do get let down before they are able to avoid being wounded or maimed in personality by the fact […] we must be able to say: here the ordinary devoted mother factor failed, without blaming anyone.”

Winnicott reports in “The Ordinary Devoted Mother” that there are reasons why a mother may fail to properly care for the child—death, new pregnancy, depression—but it is important not to blame her for these circumstances. This is vital for Alison, who does not want the book to condemn Helen and ignore her personal struggles. Alison feels that she is only wounded and believes that healing is possible.

“Oh, right! You were telling me about this the other day! The basic idea is if we weren’t rational beings, we couldn’t be irrational! Like, it’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!”

During the spider web dream, Alison interrupts Amy to explain a rationalist concept that Bechdel otherwise sees as a “platitude” (41). While Bechdel focuses more time on Eloise than Amy, she also feels guilty about dominating conversations with Amy as well as other disputes. Using Freud’s free association interpretation, however, Bechdel identifies Amy as a stand-in for herself, meaning the dream also represents her internal editor interfering with her creative id.

“Everything’s gone flat. Nothing interests me, I’ve lost my appetite. For everything. Life has become just…just this drudging effort of will.”

In her first session with Jocelyn, Alison denies being angry about her father’s suicide and instead feels a sense of listlessness. This explanation occurs early in the story, but as Bechdel reveals more about her past, she finds that she is angry not only about her father’s death, but also her tense relationships with Helen and Eloise. Based on the concept of Compromise Formation that Bechdel introduces earlier in the chapter, she replaces her anger with depression.

“His sensibility, his empathy, his intense and differential emotional responsiveness, and his unusually powerful ‘antennae’ seem to predestine him as a child to be used—if not misused—by people with intense narcissistic needs.”

This passage from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child correlates to Alison’s interpretation of her maternal relationship. The author feels as if she is both her own mother and Helen’s mother, citing examples such as always being the one to call her and having to answer if she loves her as a child. In turn, it’s painful when Alison’s creative work requires her to defy Helen’s wishes.

“It was right around the time of the Christmas pageant that my obsessive-compulsive phase began. What hostile impulses, as Freud called them, could I have been repressing at age ten? Had I been angry at my mother? Did I want to hurt her? Was I still angry at her?”

This quote links two events in the past together: the Christmas pageant Alison participates in as a child and the OCD that leads to her mother writing her diaries. The feeling of seclusion she experiences during the pageant leads to a panic attack when she visits a Christmas mass as an adult. If these hidden emotions can flare up as an adult, she wonders if her childhood abandonment is driving her to write memoirs to punish her parents.

“Do you love me?”

Alison spends childhood pursuing the favor that Helen grants her brothers, going so far as to refer to her formally as “mother” and apologize for any slight. While watching The Forsyte Saga, Helen abruptly asks Alison if she loves her. Bechdel notes that the family never talks about love, and while she wants to say yes, she is worried about being too enthusiastic or begrudging. In reality, no answer would really assure her mother. This is also an example of Alison developing her False Self to serve her mother’s needs.

“When suicide is the only defence left against betrayal of the True Self, then it becomes the lot of the False Self to organize the suicide.”

Bechdel focuses on her relationship with her father, Bruce, in Fun Home, which explains much of his cruel behavior in Are You My Mother? His apparent suicide happens after Alison comes out to him, forcing him to admit his homosexuality, and after Helen asks for a divorce. This passage by Winnicott suggests that his suicide is the result of his inability to accept his True Self as the world of his False Self falls apart. Bechdel notes that Helen sees Bruce’s open casket separately from her children, keeping her conflicted emotions to herself.

“Just before Christmas I cried quite freely for the first time in Jocelyn’s presence. As I left that day, she hugged me. I had never fully understood this custom before.”

In contrast to her cold household and passionate-but-complicated romance with Eloise, Alison receives a new level of compassion and emotional knowledge from Jocelyn. Winnicott and Jung note that the psychoanalyst intentionally takes on the role of parent to identify and fix patient issues. Physically touching or playing into that role is ethically murky, but Jocelyn later says that she would do it again because of Alison’s need for a mother figure.

“It was a perfect kick with the ball of my foot, like I’d learned in karate. I was lucky that I hadn’t hit a stud. I took a perverse pleasure in the hole. I don’t remember anyone ever fixing it. There it gaped, as long as I lived in that house.”

As Bechdel orders the story, she describes stopping sex with Eloise to kick a hole in the wall out of her anger over her partner’s affair. Later chapters, however, indicate that this cycle of infidelity occurs on both sides, and this incident comes after the two finally agree to live together. Her decision to leave the hole also foreshadows the end of their relationship after Eloise cheats again.

“Mixed in with these post-marriage missives are four poems, clearly by mom. Her light, neat typing is as identifiable as the signature. […] The poems are formal in structure and tone. Two are sonnets, which scan gracefully. But there’s an arms-length, self-conscious quality to them. As far as I know, these were the last poems she would write for the next forty years.”

Bechdel generally paraphrases her mother’s writings or obscures them with captions or other objects in the panel, which reflects Helen’s desire for privacy. This description fits Helen’s preference for highly technical poems like those of Wallace Stevens, and in Chapter 5 she regrets not continuing her poetry career. The distance Helen exhibits in her poems contrasts with Alison’s work and Adrienne Rich’s push for personal writing.

“When mom abruptly stopped kissing me good night, I felt almost as if she’d slapped me. But I was stoic. I betrayed no reaction. If seven was too old, it was too old.”

Alison’s mother gives preferential treatment to her sons over Alison throughout her childhood, with the starkest example being how Helen would coo the two brothers to sleep with Alison watching. Bechdel compares this with To the Lighthouse, where the Ramsay bedtime customs are similar to Virginia Woolf’s childhood. Despite her stoicism, Alison would dream about teachers pitying her situation.

“Couldn’t you just get on with your work? You are young, you have talent, you have a mind. The rest, whatever it is, can wait.

This is the conclusion of Helen’s letter to Alison after she comes out as a lesbian. Bechdel at first blames her homosexuality for her self-consciousness as a child, but now sees it as reuniting her psyche and body from the information overload her mind experiences as a child. Without the context of the rest of the letter, Helen’s response comes off as evasive. In Chapter 3, Helen recalls having a fit of depression when she learns that a costume designer she admires is a lesbian, which recontextualizes her response to this news.

“What just happened made me hate you.”

To calm a runaway boy that he was caring for, Winnicott would carry the boy outside, explain why he was angry, and then lock him outside. The psychoanalyst never hit the patient, but he recognized the need to openly express his hatred in order to avoid escalation. This is an unusual episode in Winnicott’s life as he never has a child of his own, giving him insight into the frustrations that a parent may have. 

“The moment when a feeling enters the body is political”

Alison finds this sentence from Adrienne Rich’s speech about patriarchal influence on female writers to be powerful, but cannot find it in her published essay. This is a personal approach to literature: There is no such thing as an objective viewpoint because all writers are informed by their upbringing and beliefs. Bechdel also links this statement to Eloise’s activism and her refusal to hide her lesbianism.

“Yeah, but don’t you think that…that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life…you can, you know, transcend your particular self?

Alison makes a rare objection to Helen’s dismissal of personal writings, defending her own creative output in the process. During this conversation, Bechdel discusses a Winnicott speech about the need for the child to repeatedly betray its mother in order to successfully complete their separation. While Helen ignores her argument at the time, she later shares a Dorothy Gallagher quote about the memoirist’s need to serve the truth over their family that demonstrates some nuance on the topic.

“I have this sense that you were a very sweet kid. A wonderful kid, in fact! Because, as an adult…and this will probably embarrass you…You’re really adorable.”

patient. To break Alison out of her self-depreciating mindset, Jocelyn praises her, uses motherly language like “adorable,” and hugs her during one breakthrough session. While Alison cannot see herself in a positive light and Jocelyn later walks back some actions, she does provide Alison the framework to understand herself.

“Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it. I know she gave me what she could.”

Helen meets Alison’s need for assurance about her cartooning with deflection and fear of scandal, saying “I don’t know why you can’t understand me” (228). Alison recognizes that her search for acknowledgement is a lost cause and hangs up in tears because she relies on her mother for living expenses, which lasts for nine months—the same period as a pregnancy. Their current relationship is more complicated, though this is because Alison is now trying to live her own life and feels that things “got easier after that” (231)

“When I look I am seen, so I exist.”

At the end of the mirror accident story, Alison shares Winnicott’s version of Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Winnicott believes that the mother’s face is the child’s first “mirror” and that other mirrors allow them to see themself as a separate being. However, Alison’s first interaction with a mirror goes horribly when she climbs onto a mirror in the family home and it falls on top of her. She also hurts her mother, first when she fears for Alison’s life and then when Bruce sneers at her for failing to watch Alison.

“I am the one whose drive was being thwarted. And I am the one who is thwarting it.”

Bechdel relates Winnicott’s idea that children develop by observing how their family uses mirrors to the two opposing mirrors in the foyer of her old house. She answers her question from the beginning of Chapter 6 as she is the one thwarting her own progress by playing the dutiful daughter and repressing her anger. Her mother also deals with this issue, and the two can only understand each other through metaphorical mirrors such as theater plays.

“Lily ‘could not bear to be called, as she might have been called had she come out with her views, a feminist.’”

This line comes from an early draft of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. One of Lily’s antagonists is the college professor Mr. Tansley, who insists that women could not paint or write (Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth. 1927). Woolf also confronts this attitude as her works do not receive academic recognition for decades. Her decision to replace the term “feminist” reflects Adrienne Rich’s view that Woolf conforms to male writing styles. 

“Here’s the vital core of Winnicott’s theory: The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction. If the object doesn’t survive, it will remain internal, a projection of the subject’s self. If the object survives destruction, the subject can see it as separate.”

Winnicott believes that children first see the mother as a part of themselves that they summon at will, and failure to separate this idea leads to the creation of a compliant False Self. Alison doesn’t destroy her mother until she is an adult when she hangs up on Helen in recognition that Helen cannot offer the nurturing love she wants. Through therapy and psychoanalysis, Alison completes this separation, and the two can live independent lives.