Description
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home used to be a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the outside of Bechdel’s childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, perpetually, when she used to be seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers regarding the mother-daughter gulf. It is a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to 1 explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, in any case, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, so that they can move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.