The Sophomore Effort
October 14, 2022
An artist working in any medium tends to have a legion of admirers who deem their first major work their finest. The sophomore slump is a familiar plight. Where the first major work is a miracle of sorts, an alchemy of aesthetic and emotional decisions made mostly independent of any powers that be, the follow-up is cultivated under a nadir of expectation. And the well that fed the first work is gone, for success has been achieved. In defiance of these sophomore trappings, you tend to see a) minute emulation of the first work’s conceit, an attempt to “recapture the magic” or b) a wholesale recalibration that does away with all that made the first work successful. While there are myriad follow-up works that achieve or surpass their predecessor’s benchmark, the yields of these approaches tend to be mixed. Bechdel doesn’t cleanly take up either. Are You My Mother? does not have a defined entry point, and it has a broader set of interests, traverses more theme clusters. But Fun Home is still a present spectre––the books are very much in conversation. Are You My Mother? is the more self-conscious party. It involves more meta tampering. Of course, beyond the weight of Fun Home’s success, there is Bechdel’s mother’s reaction to the work, which is made a central concern of Are You My Mother? Choosing to contend the sophomore trappings head-on in this way requires more rhetorical, reader-writer relationship groundwork to be laid. But how Bechdel chooses to hang a lantern on her anxieties about Are You My Mother’s very conception is its most fascinating feature and the reason I find it to be a richer, ultimately more rewarding text.
(14 October 2022)
P.S.
This is where things start to go awry, maybe. Who asked me to declare a victor? Is Are You My Mother? more rewarding? I don’t really know what that means. This was fun to write. I am fascinated by the choices authors make when it comes to their broader career arcs. What considerations figure into the decision to embark on any project? Are they conscious of their audience, of the interplay between projects, of economics, etc.? The questions might be more interesting than the answers, and I don’t how pertinent any of it is to the discussion of ugly feelings. What is my project with these postscripts? Because see, I already feel a pressure to level more varied criticism. Not every post can fail because it “doesn’t contribute to the discourse.” Something to look out for: this is also where I start to batch entries. Two on this day. Three in the next batch. Not an ideal strategy, to put off the entries until the creep of anxiety, followed by a binge. Is it apparent that these two were written on the same day? A good or bad thing?