Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“This story begins when I began to tell another story. I had the dream about the brook right before I told my mother I was writing a memoir about my father. The emotion of the dream stuck with me for days. I had gotten myself out of a dead place and plunged with blind trust into a vital, sensuous one.”

Dream interpretation is a key component of Are You My Mother? Each chapter begins with a dream first, and Bechdel explains when she had it and its significance thereafter. Memoir writing is a way for the author to grapple with her difficult family relationships, and the brook dream shows her escaping from a trapped place underground to a creative space underwater where she has freedom of movement.

"Did you see Daniel Mendelson’s article on memoir in The New Yorker? […] It’s good. Isn’t he the one who beat you for that prize? […] Oh you know. Inaccuracy, exhibitionism, narcissism, those fake memoirs. […] Did I tell you I ordered that chlorine-resistant swimsuit? It costs a hundred dollars, but I go through several swimsuits a year. […] Well, I’m a poor widow too, and I don’t want to look at vinyl siding!”

Alison transcribes her phone conversations with Helen to capture her mother’s voice. It’s difficult for the author to talk with Helen during this, but it would be hard to regardless as most conversation topics are either gossip or sore spots, like Helen’s professional envy, that would invite an argument. Alison considers this the reversal of a childhood ritual of her mother writing her diary for her, which she compares to “persuading a hummingbird to perch on your finger” (13).

“My mother’s editorial voice—precisian, dispassionate, elegant, adverbless—is lodged deep in my temporal lobes. How I envy the involuntary torrent of words that came to Virginia Woolf that day in Tavistock Square.” 

Alison struggles with writing this book, believing that the original draft focuses too much on herself and that she is avoiding something. Helen’s critique is curt and to the point: “Ha! There are too many strands!” (15). Alison trusts her mother’s judgement despite their differences, but it also builds a stern internal critic that makes writing laborious, unlike the creative rush that leads Woolf to write the mentally liberating To the Lighthouse.