About the book

Synopsis

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, her remarkable graphic memoir about her father, established itself immediately as a classic of the genre, being chosen as Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year for 2006, while The Times called it 'a profound and important book'. Now Bechdel has written another memoir, equally rich and funny, about her mother.

A voracious reader, a lover of music (from opera to death metal), a passionate amateur actress, she is also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

The result is a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the novels of Virginia Woolf to Bechdel's own adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother - to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.