Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012)

Fun Home's companion, and the most demanding book here. Published in 2012, it turns from her father to her mother, an amateur actor in an unhappy marriage, and works through that relationship by way of Bechdel's own therapy, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's ideas about the true and false self, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Each of its seven chapters opens with a dream. Expect to reread pages: the jokes are quieter and the ideas carry the weight. Readers who loved the literary puzzle of Fun Home will find it richer, while those who came for the family story may find the theory heavy going.