New graphic novel by Alison Bechdel

After Fun Home, many of us were looking to see what Bechdel would do next.  According to a very positive review in Book Forum recently, her new book, Are you my mother: a comic drama may be even better, more complex.

The opening paragraph of the review (and I really recommend Book Forum for the range and perspicacity of its reviews) by Sara Marcus has an interesting angle on graphic novels:

“The graphic “novel” may be the ideal form for memoir.  On the one hand, it offers immediacy, a fusing of reading time and narrative time: We can experience an epiphany at the same moment as the character in the frame, who may break suddenly into a wide-eyed look of surprise.  On the other hand, it makes room for a polyphony of time and space and story:  the text on a page may be paired with drawings of something else entirely, creating a visual metaphor or in more discordant cases, mirroring the way the mind can think and feel multiple things simultaneously.  And elaborate two-page spreads can foster a suspended momentum, an eddying of time. Even a not particularly dramatic journey of self-discovery can become, in a well-constructed comic, a richly enveloping world.”