Alison Bechdel

"2003 also saw the appearance of the first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, Endless Nights, which was published by DC Comics and was the first graphic novel to make the New York Times bestseller list."

I picked up the new Kampung Boy translation in the shop on Friday, 'cos all my Lats are in storage, but it has the same problem except even worse.

I thought Are You My Mother? was really tedious. I liked the stuff about her life and her girlfriends but ALL the therapy sessions/Alice Miller/Winnicott/meta-worrying/phone conversation transcribing I found very drqaining.
I like the stuff about Woolf too but tbh I'd rather just read a book of Woolf's writing. Also I got kind of vicariously bored as an artist imagining drawing so many page spreads of letters and manuscripts with superimposed narrative boxes. Clearly Bechdel has to be somewhat into that kind of drawing or she wouldn't have done so much of it but god!

None of the text stuff bothered me in Fun Home, which I liked. It felt like there was a lot more of it in her new one.

cosign. AYMM? is so oppressive to me I pretty much gave up on finishing it. I don't think Karen has finished it either which is VERY unlike her. No such probz with Fun Home.

Yeah I started just skipping all the text on the pages about Winnicott 2/3rds of the way through and it was still hard to finish.

Spoiler: in the end she still feels ambiguous about her mom! And is in therapy!

Did you get to the part where she says "I love you" to her therapist, at her therapist's prompting? It made me pretty sad.
Between this and "A Dangerous Method" I am mad artists I like got obsessed w/psychiatry.

have u read daphne merkin's piece on her life in psychotherapy? i feel like it should be read w/ AYMM

i didn't hate the book (the winnicott parts were probably my favorite) but i agree that it's nowhere as good as fun home. just not as cohesive, and lacks the really beautiful moments fun home has. but i do like this visual record of the author responding over and over to her own text, and i think that it's kinda successful as a piece of writing transposed into another form. it's like... idk, writerly? she's so interested (even in fun home + dykes) in writers and how we write, and writing as compulsion. but at the same time it's not fully invested in text but also in visual medium (which then becomes this representation of text as image).

I think I never again want to read about anyone's experience about psychotherapy. It's so boring!

i didn't find AYMM boring so i can't say whether you would or wouldn't enjoy the merkin piece, but i do think it is pretty interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08Psychoanalysis-t.html

8 clickthroughs
no I am not

I mean I'm totally vainglorious and even thinking back to my own experiences with therapy makjhbwgiogn bn pdn pnhpmo fhnm homjnro oh sorry fell asleep on the keyboard

0 clickthroughs if you press that one page button

I mean it's too long to want to read, maybe if it was a pithy fortune cookie slip I'd be down

lol i kno, i was teasing

Did you get to the part where she says "I love you" to her therapist, at her therapist's prompting? It made me pretty sad.
Between this and "A Dangerous Method" I am mad artists I like got obsessed w/psychiatry.

― chupacabra seeds (Abbbottt), Friday, July 6, 2012 5:58 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I didn't get that far.

Now I'm trying to come up w/an example of a narrative work which talks about therapy a ton yet is awesome...

robertson davies' the manticore

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm107572953/manticore-robertson-davies-paperback-cover-art.jpg

one of the best of all time

I dunno there is like this distinct brand of Northeast US therapy-centered evil-family crazy which is so oppressive to my bottle-it-up-til-u-explode-or-get-IBD midwestern psyche.

i like to combine the therapy w/ the IBD

xpost hah I started that about a decade ago and got sidetracked, have been itching to get into it again of late.

(Davies that is)

i haven't read him since high school but i read everything he wrote then and still believe they're among the greatest novels written in english

obv deptford is considered the classic, tho i thought salterton about small liberal town was really amazing.

I really liked Sybil Exposed, and I guess lots of pop nonfic about therapy, but only when it's grossly unethical therapy that reveals the awful suggestibility of the human mind – eg later-recanted repressed memories, Satanic ritual abuse, etc.

that merkin piece is not quite that, but she does wonder whether therapy made any contribution to getting her better, and in some ways if it pathologized her + made her more unwell! one thing that did bother me about AYMM (note that I haven't quite finished it, I have one more chapter to go - did not have similar state of reading during fun home fwiw) is that she didn't seem so critical about the psychology she's leaning on so heavily. maybe that changes later but she's quickly willing to accept this narrative of her relationship w/ her mother that is so heavily impacted by therapy + these psychological texts!

I've been thinking whether I should give the new comic a try, but after reading your comments I'm not so sure... I thought Fun Home was okay, but it was already a bit too dry and academic for my taste (at least compared to Dykes to Watch Out For, which is among my 5 favourite comics of all time), and apparently this one is even more so?

God, I wish she would go back to drawing Dykes. I miss them.

me too

me three. i think if you found fun home too dry + academic def stay away from this one. she's practically writing it for a grad school audience

that said, i think it's smart and that she's brilliant, but even the best writers/artists/etc have off-works - it def has its own appeal + thing going on

Though from what I've gathered FH brought her more recognition than 20+ years of doing DTWOF did (despite the pioneer nature of the latter), so I guess it's understandable she's decided to continue on the graphic novel path.

(xx-post)

http://i46.tinypic.com/dmp5p3.jpg

when asked to describe her cosmology ^

eg later-recanted repressed memories, Satanic ritual abuse, etc.

i LOVE reading about that stuff (+ coerced false confessions) I eat it up like popcorn. It started for me when I saw the docu Paradise Lost in the 90s and that guy Richard Ofshe who testified in that case.

About 7 years ago I pitched DC a Batman & Robin miniseries inspired by the Satanic Panic and Goethe's Erlkonig. It was getting some traction too but then Dan DiDio killed it, the prick.

due to the thread updates i finally sat down and finished reading the last two chapters. i don't think they substantively change my feelings about the book, but i do think that the final image (the mother putting the magic shoes on her, giving her - in the place of the emptiness - the 'way out') is really strong, both in biographic reference to the mother's gifts as an artist and an intellectual creating bechdel's own relationship to word + literature (which becomes her way of parsing that very emptiness), and also read next to the spider image. when the mother is looking at the spider wrap up the cricket - alison is sorta like the cricket + her mother is wrapping her in the silk, even as she gives her this means of escape.

i think one reason why it feels so fractured is that the themes are picked up and dropped off without feeling fully teased or explored. it's kinda like a set of images and then the reader is asked to form their own order about how they should be read. i think it's strong when mimicking this kinda amorphous sense of the unconsciousness - this pool of memories + thoughts + feelings that psychoanalysis tries to put into order (and so in this sense we are the analysts as readers). but weaker when trying to examine any particular idea or image - like the spider, or the mirror, or actress, etc. some are better developed than others, but either bc of the sort of improvisational/looser/rougher writing she describes (maybe as a way of diffusing her anal retentiveness) or bc she has sacrificed this for the more rhizomatic style, it kinda feels like she has sacrificed the text for the sake of the subtext.

I did like those god panels you posted.

we had a friend over last weekend for a meal and she noticed the book on our couch and was like, "do u kno her comic?" and so i was of course like "yes dtwof, one of the alltime greats" and she said, "what i have never met a heterosexual man who liked dtwof," but really alison bechdel is an alltime great and i will probably read whatever she writes forever until she stops writing or i stop reading. i also hope she goes back to fiction bc really two memoirs in a row is enough for anybody, really one memoir and if we're honest we probably don't need any - but certainly two is more than enough.

I really enjoyed some Peter De Vries book that had a lot of therapy in it. Maybe Comfort Me with Apples? Or The Cat's Pajamas? Yate's Disturbing the Peace has a lot of psychotherapy and it's good, too.

Hello, ilc.

that said, i think it's smart and that she's brilliant, but even the best writers/artists/etc have off-works

True, although someone smart and brilliant really ought to have recognised that putting this much dull self-absorption out as a book was a bad idea

It started for me when I saw the docu Paradise Lost in the 90s and that guy Richard Ofshe who testified in that case.

I started for me because I was a clumsy kid and this shit was the talk show zeitgeist! So I'd have a big honkin' shiner from walking into a pole or something and the other girls in the neighborhood would be putting up ***Satanic abuse repressed memory flag*** no matter how much I protested. Also once when I told my mom how much I was obsessed with the McMartin preschool trial, she pointed out we were living in LA County in 1986 and that shit was on the news constantly. Though I was too young then to remember that now. So looks like both Bechdel and I have our own boring mom-and-daughter pre-memory 'it's all connected man' pile of obsessions, I just chose not to make a book of mine.

Yeah I mean I knew about Satanic Ritual Abuse and stuff long before seeing that docu but that was what kind of related it to the whole ball of recovered-memory/false confession/well-intended therapeutic abuse wax and made me go WAU.

I think the first time someone IRL told me with a straight face about SRU was a family friend in about '88 who worked in child care. She's a very smart wordly person but it had clearly rocked her to her foundations.

Repressed Memory Flag was the least appreciated of the 'Flag' bands of the early 80s SoCal punk scene...

worldly not wordly

Fun Home is about to premiere as a musical at NYC's Public Theatre.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-Flash-In-Rehearsal-with-Public-Theaters-FUN-HOME-20130918

STOP TURNING THINGS INTO MUSICALS!

got a rave in the NYT today...

went to post something, luckily ctrl+f'd beforehand

possibly my critical faculties are dulled from reading it on the subway after a couple of drinks but 'are you my mother?' is fantastic

?!??!?!??!? How many drinks did you HAVE?

trying to work out why i like it when I don't like the Robertson Davies book mentioned above

the Davies book i disliked because it seems to require the reader to take the narrators beliefs about psychoanalysis at face value, which seems hardly less true of bechdel

possibly I just think the ideas about psychoanalysis (and therapy) in the bechdel are better ones

(grad school answer) bechdel is already presenting a subject not so much writing a memoir as subject to the discourse of memoiristic writing, and so bringing in the rules of another discourse seems less of an offense -- whereas Davies does not really question the ways his narrators subjectivity is already constrained by the format of the novel

(regular folks answer) writing novels about a successful analysis bears the same relation to writing about a successful analysis as a Sherlock Holmes mystery does to the solution of an actual crime

But the Bechdel is all so witless. It's like:

Analyst says thing.
Bechdel picks up on random word, makes excited but idiotic association, wow so significant, DO YOU SEE?
Woolf/old-timey shrink once did something tenuously related to random word. Illustrate at length.

Repeat.

nah you're just not a very good reader innit

like, just glancing through, the most common analyst-to-life segues are things like

"do you think you're angry about your father for committing suicide" >> bechdel agonises over whether this is the case
"do you think you're angry at your mother for not providing the right kind of affection" >> bechdel agonises over whether this is the case, rereads 'the gifted child' some more

feel like the relevance of the woolf/winnicott threads is too obvious to require belaboring

tbf i can see that the book i'm summarising w/ this

"do you think you're angry about your father for committing suicide" >> bechdel agonises over whether this is the case
"do you think you're angry at your mother for not providing the right kind of affection" >> bechdel agonises over whether this is the case, rereads 'the gifted child' some more

doesn't exactly scream READ ME but hey, i liked it

i enjoyed it - it was much messier than fun home, much more exposed w/ her intellectual influences and less narratively structured. but i still liked it a bunch.

nah you're just not a very good reader innit

riiiiight, so stuff like “You were gonna fix the tear [in my pants], which maybe means tear [as in crying], too! You’re healing me!” is not at all tendentious and stupid

And the fact that she couldn't be breastfed properly is definitely a sign of lacking intimacy with her mother, etc, etc, so I guess my daughter will realise her mother hates her too one of these days

everything she writes is so provisional tho - under examination but never fully embraced as an answer. that's part of what i like about it - she's very honest sometimes about feelings that are absurd or "wrong"

riiiiight, so stuff like “You were gonna fix the tear [in my pants], which maybe means tear [as in crying], too! You’re healing me!” is not at all tendentious and stupid

the point of this scene is that bechdel is providing a spurious reading of her own dream and feeling proud of herself for having Got analysis and then is totally undercut by what her therapist says to her so, yeah, you didn't read that bit right, are there any other bits you would like help with

Fine, you love this specious and padded book so much it has turned you into a condescending prat. I forgot this wasnt ILB where people can discuss stuff like this without getting personal. Bye.

now i kinda want to read this

I thought the actual mother/daughter scenes in this one were great, but the whole Winnicott thing is just too much... Even if Bechdel left the reader some room to interpret things differently than the Bechdel character in the book, the fact remains that so much of the comic is devoted to Winnicot's writings (literally), and to her trying to show how it applies to her life, and if you agree with Winnicot I guess that's fine, but if you're someone like me who feels psychoanalysis is mostly bullshit, then those bits in the comic read mostly read like a overtly long fan-letter, i.e. boring. I thought Bechdel's previous book was a bit dry and boring too, but at least that one had viewed her dad through multiple (literary and non-literary lenses), whereas this one had just the one lens, so it felt largely like psychonanalysis fan gushing.

i saw the musical at The Public and it was admirably executed and superbly acted; they perfectly recreated her world in the book

Fun Home musical now has 12 Tony nominations, including for all 3 performers playing A.B.

Terrible Alison Bechdel cover for Woolf ahoy:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/W/WEBP_402378-T1/images/I/91apsarQGAL.jpg