Bechdel is incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.
The author of Are You My Mother? (2012) and Fun Home (2006) offers something that’s not quite a memoir and thoroughly wonderful.
We meet our protagonist, Alison Bechdel, when she’s been shocked from sleep by a shotgun blast. It’s her partner, Holly, trying to scare a bear away from the compost pile on their Vermont pygmy goat sanctuary. In addition to sharing a name, this character has a lot in common with her creator. Both are in middle age. Both made their names with a comic strip about lesbians. Both have written a much-lauded memoir in graphic-novel form. And both have seen their autobiographies refashioned by other artists. Bechdel the author could have written another story from her own point of view but, in creating an avatar, she gives herself some room to mess around, and the results are delightful. Alison the character is supposed to be finishing her next book, but she finds herself endlessly distracted. There’s her sister, who wants Alison to edit her manuscript. There’s a trio of old friends who have turned into a throuple. There’s the fact that Holly’s woodchopping videos and tool reviews are turning her into an Instagram influencer. And there’s the way Alison is trying to escape finishing her book by selling a reality show that’s kind of like Queer Eye except that instead of making people look better she’ll help them live more ethically within capitalism. As Bechdel lets the lives of her characters unfold, her words and pictures become the reality show. Alison and her friends are beautiful and ridiculous and ridiculously beautiful, and Bechdel is such a master of her craft that it might take a little while to appreciate what she does here.
Bechdel is incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780063278929
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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