Are you my mother?

[dominika_kretek]

I blew way too much money on books last weekend. How marvelous to utter that sentence! To be able to buy books, to buy too many books, to think of buying books as a thing one is capable of doing, to remember to buy books, to remember what books one wants to buy when presented with the chance to buy them, too many, in fact. And the first book I am reading is Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. I'm loving it, even as the obsessive recircling so prevalent in Fun Home winds in even tighter spirals.

I've only spiraled through the first three or four chapters, but I'm enjoying just seeing some of these experiences in print, having a girlfriend, having a therapist, having a girlfriend and a therapist, inappropriate dreams about your therapist, reading psychology texts to gain insight into your therapist, transference, both witting and unwitting, the unwitting transference of talking knowingly about your own transference, the true self and the false self, thinking that "Winnicott" sounds feminine because of "Winnie," the self-absorption of thinking someone is accusing you of being self-absorbed, Virginia Woolf.

I don't think I get myself tangled up in quite as many loops as Bechdel seems to, but maybe I do, maybe I do. For the record, though, I have never gone on midnight walks past my therapist's house.

Reading, I've missed you. Writing, I've missed you too.