Building Stories
by Chris Ware
2012
Building Stories is cartoonist Chris Ware's masterwork, a collection of 14 smaller comics that together make up one larger graphic novel. Each of the smaller comics is a different size and shape, and they're all collected in a large box. There's one like a Little Golden Book, one hardcover, one the size of a daily newspaper, a trio of comic-book sized comics, a 4 panel board that unfolds like a boardgame, and several others. Supposedly you can read these in any order, although there's a suggested order on the back that I followed, and that felt satisfying.
The majority of Building Stories follows one woman across a decade or so of her adult life. She has dark hair, a prosthetic leg from a below-the-knee amputation after a childhood accident; she aspires to be a writer or an artist, and her sections are narrated by her in a stream-of-consciousness style, like we're listening to her internal monologue, or reading her diary. Throughout her life, she's self-conscious about her weight and wants to be thinner and prettier, she worries a lot about the current state of the world, she ruminates a lot on her past choices, she's lonely but has trouble connecting with others, even her husband, and once their daughter is born, she worries a lot that she will never have an important accomplishment apart from being a mother.
The other recurring characters, whose stories are more minor and seem to complement the main woman's, are an unhappily married couple who live downstairs from her for awhile, the old woman who owns the apartment building, and Branford the Bee, who is a fictional character the main woman reads stories about to her daughter, and also a real bee who intersects with other characters' stories at various points, and also also, I think maybe Branford's perspective might be pretty similar to the main woman's husband's viewpoint.
The unhappy couple fight constantly - he finds her ugly since she's gained weight, she is sick of his lack of affection, critical comments, and his attempts to control what she wears and where she goes. The old woman lives alone. She never had a steady boyfriend or got married, which she blames on needing to take care of her sick mother. They both kind of seem like alternate lives - things that could've happened to the main woman but didn't.
The Little Golden Book, which was my starting point, shows all three - the main woman, the unhappy couple, the old lady - over the course of a single 24-hour day. It's narrated by the apartment building itself. At this time, the main woman has graduated art school, lives alone, and works at a florist's shop. This is the day she'll meet her future husband for the first time and hook up with him at a party.
In the graphic novel, the woman remembers art school, her first boyfriend who got her pregnant, her abortion, and her time working as a live-in nanny for a couple of working professionals.
In the newspaper, the woman and her husband move from Chicago to the suburbs. She worries a lot about her identity - she doesn't want to be a suburbanite mother - and she deals with a couple of major losses, including her best friend who dies at 40.
The trio of comics revisits each of the main three and brings some resolution to their stories. And then the game board shows kind of a narrative diagram that maybe summarizes and maps out everything else in the box, including points of intersection you might otherwise have missed.
What Ware has produced here, despite its formal experimentation, feels very much like a very classic novel. It's a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, told through close observation of their thoughts and behavior. We see a few big moments, but also a lot of little ones. We range across time to cover entire lives, but also focus closely on specific days or periods.
Ware is very frank and unsentimental about sexuality. Characters are shown naked or undressed as the situation calls for. Everyone wants sex, but they all have a terrible time trying to fulfill them, and each person's own feelings of self-doubt or self-loathing end up being bigger obstacles than the presence or absence of someone else wanting them.
A recurring theme, especially for the main character, but also for her sort-of doppelgangers, is passivity and regret. She continuously feels like she's not living the way she wants to, including being unhappy as a wife and mother; she continuously wishes she'd made different choices, and also keeps doing things she'll regret later, in part because she keeps fixating on the past. But this is true of all the characters. You might ask, why can't they be happy? But they literally don't know how.
The main woman feels overwhelmed by the twin burdens of keeping up with what's going on in the world, and being a mother. Over and over, we see her not paying attention to her husband or daughter who are trying to engage with her, because she's thinking about the news, or housing prices, or oil, or she's stuck in the past regretting a previous time she ignored someone who needed her. She ignores the moments she has now in favor of regretting not treasuring the moments she could've had in the past. It's infuriating and very human.
I think Ware has captured something that's true for a lot of us, where you might feel a bit dissatisfied with your daily routine, but you don't know how to change it, don't even know how to set aside some time out of it to plan or prepare or act in a different way. It's very easy to make resolutions, and very hard to change habits. But the alternative is spending decades saying 'any day now, I'm going to do something different...'
Ware's art is famously very controlled and precise. In some of the smaller formats, I struggled to make out what was being shown in a tiny panel, or to read some miniature text. In a few of the larger ones, it wasn't always clear how to follow the panels in the correct narrative order. In terms of scale and scope, artistic consistency, experimentation, in terms of telling an ordinary human story from multiple allied perspectives, Ware has done something truly impressive here.
The majority of Building Stories follows one woman across a decade or so of her adult life. She has dark hair, a prosthetic leg from a below-the-knee amputation after a childhood accident; she aspires to be a writer or an artist, and her sections are narrated by her in a stream-of-consciousness style, like we're listening to her internal monologue, or reading her diary. Throughout her life, she's self-conscious about her weight and wants to be thinner and prettier, she worries a lot about the current state of the world, she ruminates a lot on her past choices, she's lonely but has trouble connecting with others, even her husband, and once their daughter is born, she worries a lot that she will never have an important accomplishment apart from being a mother.
The other recurring characters, whose stories are more minor and seem to complement the main woman's, are an unhappily married couple who live downstairs from her for awhile, the old woman who owns the apartment building, and Branford the Bee, who is a fictional character the main woman reads stories about to her daughter, and also a real bee who intersects with other characters' stories at various points, and also also, I think maybe Branford's perspective might be pretty similar to the main woman's husband's viewpoint.
The unhappy couple fight constantly - he finds her ugly since she's gained weight, she is sick of his lack of affection, critical comments, and his attempts to control what she wears and where she goes. The old woman lives alone. She never had a steady boyfriend or got married, which she blames on needing to take care of her sick mother. They both kind of seem like alternate lives - things that could've happened to the main woman but didn't.
The Little Golden Book, which was my starting point, shows all three - the main woman, the unhappy couple, the old lady - over the course of a single 24-hour day. It's narrated by the apartment building itself. At this time, the main woman has graduated art school, lives alone, and works at a florist's shop. This is the day she'll meet her future husband for the first time and hook up with him at a party.
In the graphic novel, the woman remembers art school, her first boyfriend who got her pregnant, her abortion, and her time working as a live-in nanny for a couple of working professionals.
In the newspaper, the woman and her husband move from Chicago to the suburbs. She worries a lot about her identity - she doesn't want to be a suburbanite mother - and she deals with a couple of major losses, including her best friend who dies at 40.
The trio of comics revisits each of the main three and brings some resolution to their stories. And then the game board shows kind of a narrative diagram that maybe summarizes and maps out everything else in the box, including points of intersection you might otherwise have missed.
What Ware has produced here, despite its formal experimentation, feels very much like a very classic novel. It's a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, told through close observation of their thoughts and behavior. We see a few big moments, but also a lot of little ones. We range across time to cover entire lives, but also focus closely on specific days or periods.
Ware is very frank and unsentimental about sexuality. Characters are shown naked or undressed as the situation calls for. Everyone wants sex, but they all have a terrible time trying to fulfill them, and each person's own feelings of self-doubt or self-loathing end up being bigger obstacles than the presence or absence of someone else wanting them.
A recurring theme, especially for the main character, but also for her sort-of doppelgangers, is passivity and regret. She continuously feels like she's not living the way she wants to, including being unhappy as a wife and mother; she continuously wishes she'd made different choices, and also keeps doing things she'll regret later, in part because she keeps fixating on the past. But this is true of all the characters. You might ask, why can't they be happy? But they literally don't know how.
The main woman feels overwhelmed by the twin burdens of keeping up with what's going on in the world, and being a mother. Over and over, we see her not paying attention to her husband or daughter who are trying to engage with her, because she's thinking about the news, or housing prices, or oil, or she's stuck in the past regretting a previous time she ignored someone who needed her. She ignores the moments she has now in favor of regretting not treasuring the moments she could've had in the past. It's infuriating and very human.
I think Ware has captured something that's true for a lot of us, where you might feel a bit dissatisfied with your daily routine, but you don't know how to change it, don't even know how to set aside some time out of it to plan or prepare or act in a different way. It's very easy to make resolutions, and very hard to change habits. But the alternative is spending decades saying 'any day now, I'm going to do something different...'
Ware's art is famously very controlled and precise. In some of the smaller formats, I struggled to make out what was being shown in a tiny panel, or to read some miniature text. In a few of the larger ones, it wasn't always clear how to follow the panels in the correct narrative order. In terms of scale and scope, artistic consistency, experimentation, in terms of telling an ordinary human story from multiple allied perspectives, Ware has done something truly impressive here.
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