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Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, by Alison Bechdel. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 304 pp.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. 240 pp.
In Dale Jacobs' Graphic Encounters, he discusses the importance of "[c]omplicating the view of comics so that they are not seen as simply an intermediary step to more complex word-based texts" (17). Jacobs writes that comics' readers require use of the visual, gestural, and spatial elements displayed in the panels and gutter space on a page in order to truly understand a text (14). Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? further complicate the literacies needed to understand comics as she layers her memoirs with archival, literary, and psychoanalytic figures and concepts. More than a book about her family, Bechdel's memoirs look closely at sexuality, relationships, and self-realization within herself and others. As Jacobs' work attests, graphic memoirs like Bechdel's are both interesting reads and valuable pedagogical tools. Brought into the composition classroom, these memoirs provide entry points into discussions of literacy acquisition and the writing process, research and source material, and multimodal meaning-making practices.
Multiple composition theorists have argued the importance of incorporating multimodal composing into the composition classroom (e.g., Banks; Fleckenstein; Jacobs; Palmeri; Shipka). Patricia Dunn, for example, believes that we need to "take better advantage of multiple literacies, that we investigate and use whatever intellectual pathways we can to help writers generate, organize, re-conceptualize, and revise thoughts and texts" (1). Dunn challenges written texts as the primary means of communication and focuses instead on alternate ways of knowing that come from practices like sketching ideas or walking through a paper. As multimodal texts that highlight alternate ways of knowing, Bechel's memoirs serve as useful examples for students as they deal with complicated ideas and themes using visual, gestural, and spatial modes of meaning that go beyond the textual.
Bechdels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? both center on her attempts to better understand her relationships with her parents. Fun Home describes the aftermath of her father's death, whereas Are You My Mother? focuses on Bechdels relationship with her mother, set during the time when she was composing Fun Home. Both memoirs rely...