Are You My Mother?
by Helen Rubinstein
Alison Bechdel’s book was literally my essay’s scaffolding: when I sat down at the computer, it was with a pile of Postits I’d pasted all over its pages, then removed — text “panels” responding to text-and-art panels. I started writing in all-caps Comic Sans right away, just for fun, thinking I might find a better font for the essay later. And I began using these odd line-indentations pretty quickly, too, trying to approximate the way the eye moves between distinct narrative modes — exposition, dialogue, varied points-of-telling — in a graphic memoir. I was imagining writing around Bechdel’s art, “drawing” her work into mine the way that she draws around (and literally redraws) the words of Winnicott, Miller, and Woolf. By the end of the first draft, though, it was clear that my own narrative had squeezed out most of my opportunities to incorporate Bechdel’s imagery. And, maybe because it had liberated me in some way, the Comic Sans font by then felt too endemic to the project to change.
Helen Rubinstein’s essays have been published in The Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, Witness, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and her fiction in The Collagist, Ninth Letter, and Salt Hill. Recent work appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Vol. 9 and was noted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1