carlin
As someone who loves both Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, and hasn't read Dykes to Watch Out For, this was underwhelming and not my thing.
For one, Bechdel is satirising her own life, and I don't care for it (I'm not a fan of docudramas and I don't see why autofiction would have me feeling otherwise) and for another this is much less intricate than FH/AYMM due to the different genre — maybe the closest comparison i can give is between comic books vs graphic novels. For example, in this the pacing would occasionally jank as a scene ran out of steam after three pages or we have an unannounced time skip. I think what made this more uncomfortable for me, is this is her first (afaik) book fully coloured and shaded and so it feels like it should have a higher value due to the greater resource investment.
I also side-eye her outlook as a lottt of these jokes are about non-binarity, leftism and vegans...
The best part of the book is when it focuses on the other couple navigating their new realtionship (with their child). This was fun, but again parts of it make me be like what is the joke here? (there is a lot of focus on his sexual fantasy which I feel like is meant to be self-evidently funny). Idk it just feels like if this came out 15 years ago there would be an attack helicopter joke.
I think there is a generational problem with my enjoyment of this, as I relate most strongly with the characters in the generation below instead of Bechdal's generation. A flip side version written by JR about their mom etc would probably work better for me (in the way it wouldn't if Bechdel was to read it).
Overall, not for me. I continue to hunger to read books by communists
As someone who loves both Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, and hasn't read Dykes to Watch Out For, this was underwhelming and not my thing.
For one, Bechdel is satirising her own life, and I don't care for it (I'm not a fan of docudramas and I don't see why autofiction would have me feeling otherwise) and for another this is much less intricate than FH/AYMM due to the different genre — maybe the closest comparison i can give is between comic books vs graphic novels. For example, in this the pacing would occasionally jank as a scene ran out of steam after three pages or we have an unannounced time skip. I think what made this more uncomfortable for me, is this is her first (afaik) book fully coloured and shaded and so it feels like it should have a higher value due to the greater resource investment.
I also side-eye her outlook as a lottt of these jokes are about non-binarity, leftism and vegans...
The best part of the book is when it focuses on the other couple navigating their new realtionship (with their child). This was fun, but again parts of it make me be like what is the joke here? (there is a lot of focus on his sexual fantasy which I feel like is meant to be self-evidently funny). Idk it just feels like if this came out 15 years ago there would be an attack helicopter joke.
I think there is a generational problem with my enjoyment of this, as I relate most strongly with the characters in the generation below instead of Bechdal's generation. A flip side version written by JR about their mom etc would probably work better for me (in the way it wouldn't if Bechdel was to read it).
Overall, not for me. I continue to hunger to read books by communists