If any kind of human relationship can be called typically baroque, it's that between a woman and her mother. Prudent men regard the intricacies of this terrain with awe. Even in fairly tranquil mother-daughter bonds there are flourishes of longing, resentment and tenderness that no sensible person would ever try to chart.
Alison Bechdel is not a sensible person, as her alter egos – first in her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, more recently in her celebrated graphic memoir Fun Home and this sequel, Are You My Mother? – demonstrate. The cartoon version of Bechdel is boyish and fretful, a sort of lesbian Woody Allen, equally prone to seizure by doubt or by the giddy, centrifugal force of some idea. She is comical and, as a therapist depicted in Are You My Mother? tells her, adorable, a quality that allows her to carry readers where they might not otherwise be keen to go.
Fun Home described Bechdel's rather gothic childhood in small-town Pennsylvania, where her father worked as both high-school English teacher and funeral home director. He devoted most of his time, however, to lovingly restoring and furnishing the family's enormous old Victorian house. After Bechdel came out to her parents at 19, she learned her father had a history of secret homosexual affairs, the revelation of which may have been behind his death in a traffic accident a few weeks later. Now, Are You My Mother? scrutinises Bechdel's relationship with her other parent, a woman not only still alive but also on hand to offer comment. (She doesn't think much of memoir as a genre: "I just don't know why everyone has to write about themselves.")
Like all of Bechdel's work, Are You My Mother? is furiously literary, full of citations and quotations, and crafty symbolic parallels to the books its author is so often depicted reading with furrowed brow. The presiding genii of this particular work include Adrienne Rich, Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller and, above all, Virginia Woolf and the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. ("I want him to be my mother," cartoon Alison says.) The concepts Winnicott contributed to object relations theory (the "good enough" mother, transitional objects, the true and false self, etc) provide themes for each of the book's seven chapters, but its swirling, circular structure derives from Woolf.
As Bechdel recollects her childhood, her love affairs, her interactions with two different therapists and, throughout it all, her efforts to get the recognition she has always craved from her mother, her account loops in and out of itself chronologically. The key image of Are You My Mother? comes toward the end of the book, but is pulled from the beginning of Bechdel's life, all the way back in her father's monstrous mansion. Two mirrors faced each other in the foyer, creating an infinite regression of images of whoever happened to be standing in the little room.
Winnicott held that infant and mother regard each other as mirror image – a replica of the self that is at the same time inaccessible. Bechdel feels that until she can get her mother "out of my head" the two women can never truly know each other, and that an exorcism of this kind is exactly what Woolf achieved by writing To the Lighthouse. Woolf got the idea for that novel while "walking round Tavistock Square". The young Winnicott's analyst had his office a block away. Bechdel imagines the two crossing paths on that very day in a beautiful series of pages that show just how masterfully she has developed her ability to fuse drawing and diagram in a visual poetics of thought.
Bechdel's superbly flexible and eloquent images have only got better since Fun Home, which is fortunate given that Are You My Mother? contains some dramatically unpromising material. In one of her paroxysms of self-doubt, Bechdel quotes a passage from Woolf where the novelist notes she has opted to "banish the soul" from her diary. Even if she were to set out to do otherwise, Woolf writes, "what happens is that, as usual, I'm going to write about the soul & life breaks in."
A lot of Are You My Mother?, on the other hand, is "about the soul" or, as Bechdel puts it, "information about my internal life". Fun Home was about a man so intent on squelching his internal life that it backed up and overflowed in the form of decor, a tortured soul made manifest in flocked wallpaper and carved mahogany. The soul, it seems, is as likely to break into life as the other way round.
It's not that Bechdel's revelations in Are You My Mother? are less significant than those in Fun Home. In fact, they are more profound. Still, in the realm of art, a grotesque Victorian pile fit for Miss Havisham is always going to register more persuasively than lines such as, "This 'mind-psyche' that takes over and replaces the mother is a version of the compliant false self." There's a bit too much therapy in Are You My Mother?. Psychology boils away the particulars of individual experience to arrive at abstract generalities. It may get at the same truths that art does, but the trip isn't nearly as much fun.
• Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia is published by Little, Brown.
