![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Even though Fun Home was organized by theme rather than chronology, and circled back on itself repeatedly, the book felt somehow linear. Her father’s life had the ready-made arc of a story-from his frequent rages during Alison’s childhood, through his secret affairs with young men, and ending with his apparent suicide. ![]() Yet the two projects are far from parallel. That book was about her father, and this one is about her mother. Even a not particularly dramatic journey of self-discovery can become, in a well-constructed comic, a richly enveloping world.Ĭomic artist Alison Bechdel achieves this transformation in Are You My Mother?, the follow-up to her addictive and nearly flawless 2007 memoir, Fun Home. And elaborate two-page spreads can foster a suspended momentum, an eddying of time. On the other hand, it makes room for a polyphony of time and space and story: The text on a page may be paired with drawings of something else entirely, creating a visual metaphor or, in more discordant cases, mirroring the way the mind can think and feel multiple things simultaneously. On the one hand, it offers immediacy, a fusing of reading time and narrative time: We can experience an epiphany at the same moment as the character in the frame, who may break suddenly into a wide-eyed look of surprise. The graphic “novel” may be the ideal form for memoir. ![]()
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