The red tones in the artwork made me feel weird and I didn't know why. While the visuals are similar in wonderful ways, the content is so far removed from "Fun Home" that I had trouble adjusting at first. I checked this out, intending to treat it as a companion memoir to "Fun Home." Almost instantly, I realized I was wrong to do so. Glad I read it, but nowhere near as strong as Fun Home, and it doesn't make me want to seek out her most recent effort, which is apparently about fitness fads? I guess I would say Bechdel is a skilled graphic memoirist, but I didn't really feel like this made the best use of those skills. Which is appropriate, one supposes, as one of this book's points is that Bechdel doesn't really know her mother. What had she done that cast such a long shadow? The mother is an interesting character, but I also felt like she was not quite seen in this book. It tries to weave together a number of different elements (Bechdel's childhood, Bechdel in therapy, discussions of the history of psychology, Bechdel writing the book itself), with the effect that I felt Bechdel's relationship with her mother got kind of lost, to the extent that it wasn't actually clear to me what Bechdel's beef with her mother was. Though I found this effectively composed, I also found it somewhat diffuse. Fun Home was about Bechdel's father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide this volume is (obviously) about her mother, a woman Bechdel has never quite figured out nor gotten beyond.
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