Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

While Helen accepts what she feels are inconsistences in Fun Home, she also tells her daughter that she would never understand her side of events (251). Afterwards, Alison dreams of removing a large tumor from her face. She finds herself at Stonehenge with dumpster-lined condos surrounding it. After extensive dream recording and psychoanalyzing, Alison begins to understand how her mind operates.

Alison compares her parents to the Ramsays in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Based on Woolf’s own parents, the husband is virulent, and the mother is idealized. Alison relates this to a day when Helen insists that she is equal to Bruce after they fight. Alison also notes that Woolf uses the word “feminist” in early drafts of the book.

Jocelyn tells Alison that her anxiety is rooted in her anger toward her mother, but Alison only feels empty. On Jocelyn’s request, Alison asks Helen what her mother’s most important lesson is. She says, “That boys are more important than girls” (264). Alison finds this hypocritical, but Helen insists that her treatment is better in comparison.

In 1964, Winnicott speaks to the Progressive League on feminism, noting that men and women have mutual envy of each other, and misogyny comes from a boy’s reliance on his mother. His last major paper before his death in 1968, “The Use of an Object,” argues that babies can only properly use a mother once they understand that she is separate from them. The Good-Enough Mother facilitates this, and the psychoanalyst serves this role if she fails. The goal is for the child to destroy this bond without destroying the mother. If they don’t, the mother remains an internal projection of the self. The paper also warns about interpreting patients too quickly.

Jocelyn believes that Alison blames herself for failing to receive love, but Alison cannot see herself as a good person. A few days later, Alison finds Eloise cheating with Chris again and ends their relationship. She visits Jocelyn hoping for another hug, but Jocelyn politely refuses. Afterwards, Alison walks alone in a blizzard, desperate for any human touch. Citing Winnicott, she acknowledges that hugging comes from a newborn’s fear of falling apart and that Jocelyn’s refusal is necessary. In their final session together, Jocelyn and Alison talk about the time Jocelyn broke the rules of therapy by calling Alison “adorable” yet affirms she would do it again because her patient was in need of a “positive mother figure” (274).

Alison has a fear of vomiting stemming from an incident as a 10-year-old in which she throws up in front of her mother just before reaching the toilet. Meanwhile, Helen’s arachnophobia comes from watching a spider eat a grasshopper as a child. Winnicott suggests that phobias emerge from a failure to grasp a subjective object, leaving a gap that the fear fills in.

Alison emails Jocelyn about Fun Home’s publication only to learn of her passing ten months earlier from cancer. The news comes at a chaotic point in Alison’s life, including the end of a 13-year relationship with Amy. During a book tour, Helen shares a Dorothy Gallagher quote with Alison about the memoirist’s need to serve the story rather than the family or truth.

Alison sends a new draft of Are You My Mother? to Helen. She calls it a coherent “metabook” (285). Happy, Alison believes that she has destroyed the object, and the object has survived the destruction. Alison thinks that her disability game and her mother’s willingness to play along represents a fixing of their mutual invisible wounds. Bechdel ends the chapter by acknowledging the gap in their relationship, but argues that through creating this void, her mother has also allowed her to find her way out.