Mother wound, creative collaboration and relational healing: examining graphic vignettes from are you my mother?

Abstract

This article will examine the American cartoonist and writer Alison Bechdel's memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) through the lens of graphic medicine. I will approach her experience of not receiving emotional support, validation, and appreciation from her mother as a "wounding" ("mother wound") to engage more comprehensively with the process and difficulty of the incomplete/ongoing nature of healing. Conceptual frameworks such as Bethany Webster's "Mother Wound," Sigmund Freud and Dominick LaCapra’s idea of "working through," and Ian William et al.’s "Graphic Medicine" have been engaged with to argue that Bechdel’s experience of seeking and engaging in years of therapy and creative collaboration with her mother is an attempt to understand her self in relation to the m(other). In self-picturing her suffering, Bechdel portrays the inter-subjective experiences of surviving a wound and the arduous task of seeking and receiving formal and informal care. The graphic format of the memoir, with panels, speech bubbles, illustrations of handwritten diaries, and hand-drawn photographs, allows Bechdel to visualize the complicated mother-daughter relationship. The memoir is a testament to the entangled and non-linear nature of trauma, memory, and the possibilities that creative collaboration offers for relational healing.