A Mother Is a Story With Neither Beginning Nor End

Divided into seven sections?each named after a key concept of Winnicott?s theories of infant development?Are You My Mother? flouts writing-school rules. It lengthily recounts Bechdel?s dreams and her therapy sessions, which revolve around what it was like to live with parents who were narcissistically self-involved. More startlingly, Bechdel tells us that as she writes chapters, she gives them to her mother, Helen, for comment. Then she writes about what her mother says, or, more tellingly, doesn?t say. In one of the very first scenes in the book, Alison and Helen are talking on the phone when Helen rather passive-aggressively praises a New Yorker article about the narcissism of memoir-writing (?Isn?t he the one who beat you for that prize?? she asks, of the author), and Bechdel reflects on her ?fear that Mom will find this memoir about her ?angry.? ? The stakes are all laid out, if implicitly: The daughter?s never-ending desire for the mother?s approval, on the one hand, and her recognition, on the other, of the mother?s failures and limitations, on the other. (Perhaps most painfully, Helen has never accepted her daughter?s lesbianism.)

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