"Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel

In this follow up to "Fun Home," in which she wrote about growing up with her closeted father, Bechdel now explores her relationship with her mother.  Helen Bechdel was a teacher and amateur actress, a very smart woman unhappily married to a closeted gay man.  Although she has three children, she is not the maternal sort; in fact, she stopped touching or kissing her daughter when Alison was seven.  The author weaves back and forth through time landing on instances from her childhood, college years, post-college struggles, and recent events.  This made the story hard for me to follow, although I'm sure it wasn't supposed to be linear since each chapter has a theme rather than a chronology.  Bechdel refers to the theories of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the words of writer Virginia Woolf throughout, and she also discusses insights she's had through many sessions in therapy.  I didn't like this book as much as I did "Fun Home," probably because this was nothing like I'd ever read and some of the concepts of Winnicott's were difficult to understand.  Although the author does come to understand and better accept her mother and their relationship, it's sad that she didn't receive more love from either parent.  286 pages.