comic_memoir epitome of incomprehensibility As in a memoir told with comics, not one told by a comedian. You can also say "graphic novel memoir," but "novel memoir" seems like a contradiction (though see Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You for a non-comic, if darkly comedic, mix of both). Or it could be an new sort of memoir. Novel. Original. Anyway, whatever you call the genre, I remembered that the winter course I'm taking might involve rereading Maus, so it led me to think: which graphic memoirs do I like the best? Definitely, Persepolis is my favourite. Maus is probably my second-favourite. Now, I can't really say which is better. I *like* Persepolis better, but that's about taste as well as judgment: child Marji/Marjane has an imaginative stubbornness and a stubborn imagination (relatable). The art style appeals to me - it's doodly but with strong lines, flowy yet simple. In terms of character building and insight, the author doesn't hesitate to show when her younger self was silly or in the wrong. Neither does she skip her own bravery in pushing through oppressive circumstances. And then Marji's imagination does provide a bit of escape from the outside world bearing down on her. When I read Maus, it felt like there was no emotional let-up (though you have at least a few calm pages - e.g., Art talking to his fiancee/wife). I had to escape a bit into my own imaginings the second time I read it, a few years ago. Even as I was reading about a man's family and friends meeting terrible and unfair deaths, I was thinking, "Okay, so everyone has an animal head based on their nationality and/or ethnicity. Are there any Canadians? WHAT ANIMAL ARE CANADIANS??" Reader, there are no Canadians. At least not that I spotted. But the book is so good, it doesn't need Canadians. Emotionally it's a difficult read because it switches between timelines of mortal danger and frustrating family conflict. Basically, the writer is interviewing his father about his experience surviving the Holocaust. In the present of the narrative - late 70s / early 80s - he has to deal with his the dad's difficult personality. That stubborn personality? It probably helped him survive - along with sheer luck. But the son gets frustrated because it seems like his father is creating needless difficulties for him and others. Oh yes, and everyone has animal heads. It makes sense in context, sort of. The first volume of Persepolis takes place around the same time as the present of Maus, but in Iran. It's about a girl growing up in an increasingly repressive society. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution deposed the Shah; this could have gone many ways - liberal democratic? communist third-bloc? - but the hardline religious forces won out and rules, rules, and rules start being imposed. For example, Marjane has to wear a veil at school, which she never had to before. (An ironic echo can be found in Quebec and France's misaimed secularism laws. How is forcing people *not* to wear a hijab any different...? But against_Bill_21 has more of that stuff.) Then, in 1980, the Iran-Iraq war starts. At one point, Marji's neighbourhood is bombed; luck spares her and her family, but it's hard to know what will happen next. ...Unless you read it, an activity I'm recommending. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Maus by Art Spiegelman. And if anyone has any others to suggest or write about, yes please! 230830 ... raze you know, i own "maus", but i've never once read it. i need to remedy that one of these days. there are a few others on my shelf i still need to dig into too — "marzi" and "today is the last day of the rest of your life" among them. i kind of want to read roz chast's "can't we talk about something more pleasant?" and i kind of don't. because i'm pretty sure it would destroy me. i've always been fascinated by the form. at its best, i think graphic_novels that are also memoirs can orient you inside the life of the author in a way nothing else can. they're almost like films you hold in your hands. of those i *have* read, david small's "stitches" was really powerful. "fun home", as good as it was, left me a little cold. though maybe that was the point. much like alison bechdel could never connect with her father in the way she wanted to, i felt like there was something holding me back from being as moved by her story as i should have been. allie brosh's books are alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. she has some very wise things to say about depression. the chapter about her sister in "solutions and other problems" is devastating. you wouldn't think glorified stick figures could wield such emotional weight, but there's a stretch of silent panels in there that moved me to tears. (i think i wrote about both of her books on what_are_you_reading?) i hesitate to recommend phoebe gloeckner's "a child's life (and other stories)". robert crumb should have been thrown in a snake-filled pit for the creepiness of his introduction, and some of the abuse that's depicted is too horrifying for words. i'm not sure how phoebe survived it. it's a book i don't think i'll be able to read again. part of me almost wishes i could somehow un-read it. but the artwork is incredible. and "minnie's third love, or: nightmare on polka street" is one of the best things i've read in any format. that eleven-page comic justifies the entire book's existence. it's a searing story of damaged people trying and failing to care for one another, with unexpected grace notes like a bottle of wine that says this on the label: "the kind of good cheap california wine that makes girls cry and give blowjobs to jerks". "the girl from a different world" cuts deep too. i guess it's more of an anthology than a standalone thing. but with a selection of work that covers more than twenty years, it offers a unique opportunity to chart the artist's development over time. even the anatomical drawings that have nothing to do with anything around them are mesmerizing in the way they conflate bodies with landscapes. i haven't read her other book, "the diary of a teenage girl". i'm not sure i want to. and i like how i just wrote more about the book i probably wouldn't suggest to anyone than i did about any of the ones i would. 230831 ... e_o_i Hey, I think I did just that about Sarahbande. (It was a French murder mystery that I picked up to Improve My French, but it was too gruesome. Yes, my French was gruesome.) But I came here to say: yay, Allie Brosh!! I read her Hyperbole and a Half earlier this summer, first picking it up out of nostalgia (fond memories of her online Alot) but gulping it all up for the amazing storytelling. Right after the now-reforming dog bit my hand, too. I guess I just didn't sort it into the "memoir" category because I associate that with longer narratives rather than episodes. I should have put in a spot for episodic comic memoirs. Anyway, her way with words made me laugh more than once - e.g. when she imagined how her dogs' minds worked. And thank you for sharing about the books, now and earlier. It's not just that you've read a lot of graphic_novels (is the plural form the linked one?) but that you have such beautiful ways of describing them. And I enjoy reading everyone's writing on those book pages - it's like simultaneously browsing a library and having a conversation. 230831 ... e_o_i ...and without librarians telling one to shush. (It's okay, some of my best parents have been librarians.) 230831 ... e_o_i Recently_read Good_Talk by Mira Jacob and I reaaally want to finish Ducks by Kate Beaton, a newishly released memoir. Canadian content! But she'd be good no matter where she's from, provided she had the opportunity to write/draw. You might know her for the webcomic Hark! a Vagrant. I started reading Ducks in Indigo a few weeks ago and had to tear myself away. Can I convince brother Y. to give it to me Christmasfully? We shall see. (The Purple Bookstore rearranged its stuff and has a "booktok" section now. Harrumph. I couldn't find the poetry section either. I'm sure it's there, but I couldn't find it.) 241217 ... ovenbird I read “Ducks” a year or two ago, and it really was incredible! I’m not a huge reader of graphic novels or memoirs but when I do pick one up I’m reminded that I really enjoy the format. So this year I picked up Tessa Hulls’ graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, which won the Pulitzer. It was her first book and she insists it will be her last. In an interview with Mattea Roach of the CBC Hulls says, “I truly do believe that the reason I was born as an artist and a writer—and it was clear that I could never be anything else—was because someone in my family had to finish this story.” It’s hard to imagine having a sense of purpose that stark, but Hulls spent ten years writing and illustrating a sprawling intergenerational memoir that stretches from China in 1927 to present day California. She tells the story of her grandmother, a journalist exposing the horrors of communist China who fell into a madness from which she never escaped; her mother, split in two by trauma; and herself, an American born child trying to untangle the web of history, culture, and intergenerational trauma that shaped her. The resulting book is monumental and reading it was a deeply impactful experience. While I had some vague knowledge of what Maoism did to China from the 1920s-1970s reading this memoir brought me face to face with atrocities I couldn’t have imagined. People were in such a severe state of starvation that they resorted to eating children, trading their offspring with neighbours so they didn’t have to eat their own. In 1958 Mao developed a campaign to eliminate “pests” from China, specifically flies, mosquitoes, rodents, and sparrows. People were given quotas of animals to kill. To kill the sparrows Mao forced the entire nation outside with pots and pans with the order to make noise every time the birds tried to land until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Over a billion birds were killed. Hulls writes, “In the end they were destroyed by their own fear.” And this is very much at the core of the narrative which explores the way her grandmother was also kept aloft by fear and broken by the resulting psychosis. There is no doubt that this book is a literary triumph, but fundamentally it allows the reader to witness a process of healing. Hulls explores the way writing itself was a radical act of reclamation and self discovery. Towards the end she points out that the Chinese word for writer is comprised of two characters: “make” and “family/home.” Hulls picks up the legacy of her own grandmother, a woman who spent her life writing the story of her trauma again and again but never finding a way out of the past, and discovers a way to write into the future, creating a new structure to house her family’s story. Though I have not experienced trauma to even remotely the degree of the women in Hulls’ family I think I write for a similar reason. I write to build a home inside of myself that turns the raw material of my life into something that holds enough meaning to shelter me from madness. Writing is what lets me find my place in the family of things. 251210 what's it to you? who go blather from