GRAPHIC NOVEL:Alison Bechdel's exploration of her relationship with her mother balances any tendency towards self-indulgence with humour

Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel Jonathan Cape, 290pp. £16.99

WHEN THE WRITER and artist Alison Bechdel was in her 20s, she called home and told her mother, Helen, that a book of her cartoons was about to be published. “I have to tell you,” she told her mother, “they’ll be cartoons about lesbians.” After asking if she could publish it under another name, Helen told her daughter, “I would love to see your name on a book, but not on a book of lesbian cartoons.” “I don’t know what I expected . . .” Bechdel wrote in her diary that night. “I hadn’t quite steeled myself to cope with that silence between us.”

The incident – Bechdel’s desire to impress and be understood, Helen’s dissatisfaction, the silence between them – seems to sum up the relationship between mother and daughter. Bechdel’s brilliant new book, Are You My Mother?, is the story of her attempts to understand that relationship. Intertwined with her family story are two other significant figures in Bechdel’s life: Virginia Woolf, whose diaries captivate her, and Woolf’s contemporary Donald Winnicott, the influential British paediatrician and pyschoanalyst, whose kindness and understanding of children make him seem, to Bechdel, like the mother she never had.

Bechdel made her name with the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, an entertaining and addictive soap opera about a group of queer friends in a Midwestern city, which she wrote and drew for more than 20 years. But it was the publication of her critically acclaimed memoir, Fun Home, in 2006, that brought her to a wider audience. The award-winning bestseller explored Bechdel’s relationship with her father; she describes it as the story of “how my closeted gay dad killed himself a few months after I came out to my parents as a lesbian”.

In Are You My Mother? she takes on an even more complex challenge: examining her relationship with a parent who is very much alive and has strong feelings about her daughter’s work. This is not only a family memoir; it’s also a book about writing a family memoir, and in it Bechdel documents Helen’s reaction to the fact that her daughter keeps airing the family linen in public; by the end of the book Helen has read its opening chapters. (She’s still not particularly pleased about the whole thing but tells her daughter, “Well, it coheres.”)

Helen comes across as a complicated woman whose creative ambitions – she was a talented amateur actor, musician and writer – have been both thwarted and, in what Bechdel realises may be her mother’s greatest gift, transmitted to her daughter. “I know she wishes I weren’t writing this book about her,” writes Bechdel. “The irony is that if it weren’t for how effectively she modelled creative risk taking, I would probably not be writing it.”

The artwork in Fun Home strongly resembled the images in Dykes – the same strong, satisfying Hergé-style lines, the same detailed but unfussy backgrounds. In Are You My Mother? she adopts a slightly different approach: the lines are lighter and more fragile, the faces of the figures more naturalistic. The washes of colour – greys and reds – are more painterly. But it’s still immediately recognisable as Bechdel’s work, lively, fresh and expressive, especially when she draws children or animals; few artists draw small children and cats with such accuracy and unsentimental tenderness.

The book expands the possibility of the graphic narrative, showing just what can be done with the form in the hands of an artist whose literary skill is matched by visual inventiveness. Sometimes the text boxes tell one story while the panels beneath tell another: a textual account of Winnicott’s work with troubled evacuees is juxtaposed with scenes of a teenage Bechdel arguing with her mother, for example. When she quotes from other texts – old family letters, Woolf’s diaries – she painstakingly draws the original pages, highlighting the significant sentences. Family photos and book illustrations – a page from a beloved Dr Seuss book that suddenly seems to reflect her childhood, EH Shepard’s Winnie the Pooh illustrations – are depicted with careful accuracy.

Of course, a book about writing a book about your mother and your therapy sessions could be hideously self-indulgent, and there are times when Bechdel’s years of therapy influence the language a little too much. But those moments are constantly balanced by her sense of humour and, crucially, her acute self-awareness. Throughout the book, she mocks her own pretensions, and in a recent New Yorker profile she told the writer Judith Thurman that “all the characters in Dykes are more or less me. All I’ve ever written about is myself, and this book, if I finish it, may be the most solipsistic piece of insanity ever published.”

Now that book is finished, and it shows that writing intensely about oneself doesn’t have to alienate the reader. At one stage, when discussing Bechdel’s work, her mother tells her that “the self has no place in good writing”. In response, Bechdel says, “Yeah, but don’t you think that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life you can, you know, transcend your particular self?” This humane, complex and beautiful book proves her right.

Anna Carey’s novel The Real Rebecca won last year’s Senior Children’s Book of the Year award. The sequel, Rebecca’s Rules, is due in September