I’ve been a fan of Alison Bechdel’s comic work for years, but Fun Home was a game-changer. I first saw the musical version on stage, and was blown away, then immediately bought the book and was blown away all over again. The darkly (accent on darkly) comic story of her relationship with her father, Fun Home combines Bechdel’s words with her dense, richly detailed artwork to tell a story that’s heartbreaking and funny in equal measure.

Are You My Mother? takes on Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, and it’s just as densely layered, just as powerful, just as heartbreaking and funny as Fun Home. It’s subtitled A Comic Drama, and that’s an apt description, but it’s so much more than that. Bechdel has honed her storytelling style to a razor’s edge—she travels back and forth in time, circles around themes, doubles back to add detail and texture, without ever once losing the thread of the story. With words and art in perfect synchronicity, it’s a high wire act few graphic novelists could pull off.

Bechdel’s mother is a complicated, contradictory woman, and in the wrong hands she could become a caricature. Instead, Bechdel creates a deeply personal portrait of her mother, and of her relationship with her. Along the way she shares shockingly honest, intimate details about herself, her experiences with therapists, and various lovers, along with entertaining, thoughtful side trips concerning, among others, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

Through it all, Bechdel’s intelligence, curiosity, and (yep, I’m saying it) creative genius shines through. Are You My Mother? is a deeply felt, beautifully executed masterpiece.