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To appropriately honor an under-recognized but salient national holiday: Comic Book Day on September 25, I offer this week Alison Bechdel’s new (2012) graphic memoir Are You My Mother? I have never much enjoyed comic books, or their higher-brow equivalent, graphic novels. A sequel to her prior memoir about her father, Fun Home, Are You My Mother? not to be confused with the 1960 children’s book with the same name, though strongly resonant with its theme, was an unexpected delight.

Alison Bechdel uses non-linear, episodic chronology to tell the story of how her mother’s invisible hand has guided her creative work. I use “invisible hand” purposefully appropriating Adam Smith’s metaphor which describes the self-regulating behavior of the market economy because it underscores the tension in Bechdel’s account. How much of the self is autonomous and inherent? How much has been shaped and set in motion by circumstances and parental inputs during childhood and adolescence?

The book is infused with apt snippets from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and diaries, summaries of key points made by psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller, among other blurbs from various development theories. Through it all, Bechdel asks how the self copes with, or self-regulates, the competing influences. How does attachment to others delimit the self’s perimeter?

The trouble with telling the story of self is that selfhood goes like a frayed and frizzed braid. There are split ends and strange loops. It would mar and belie the portrayal to attempt a self telling in the linear, because, Bechdel reveals, we don’t develop self until we can see it, and the seeing of ourselves, the glimpses in the mirror, seem to happen out of sequence. Besides, this book, with strict chronology, would be as interesting as cornrows.

So Bechdel shapes the chapters around thematic nodes such as “True and False Self,” “Mind,” “Hate.” She volleys backward and forward in time following the episodic chronology of self-discovery along these nodes. “The story has no end,” she admits at the end, “but now it’s five years later, and I must manufacture one.” However, where sequence is relevant, she orients the reader with tactful clarity, “I had the spiderweb dream two years after the one about the brook, and immediately after starting to read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams” (42). She tightly controls the way the reader will interpret the significance of sequence. In this way, we understand that the “truth” has been “manufactured.” But it is not cheap. Her overly processed scenes (far from organic) are rife with significance so that thankfully we don’t have to sort through cluttered pages like the thrift bin at Goodwill. In Bechdel’s shelved and well-lit account, as in a high end boutique, the fine goods are on display.