Melody Murray's Books

Wow. I am having a hard time believing how much I disliked this book. The two stars are for the drawings, not the text. I found it recursive, uninteresting- no, stultifying, masturbatory and at heart fairly hollow. There are pages and pages of transcriptions from the writings of eminent Freudians, pages of Bechdel's therapy, and pages of the dreams of both Bechdel and eminent Freudians. Perhaps my own psychoanalysis would be interesting to me (though I doubt it)- someone else's surely is not. Despite the claustrophobic focus on Bechdel and her anxieties, there's a curious distance here that fed my boredom and made turning every page a struggle. It's ostensibly a memoir of her relationship with her mother, but I don't think this worked out very well. It might be just too hard to get the proper distance when the subject of one's retrospective is still alive and opining on one's work. I am a huge fan of Dykes to Watch Out For and I loved Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic with all my heart. This one didn't work for me. Not even a little.