Super Late Bloomer

 
 
Super Late Bloomer
My Early Days in Transition
An Up and Out Collection

by Julia Kaye

Andrews McMeel
2018

 

 

Super Late Bloomer is a collection of autobiographical comics by Julia Kay, drawn in the 4 panel cartoon style of a daily newspaper comic. For Kaye, these comics functioned like a diary, helping her keep track of moods and events during her first summer living openly as a trans woman. Kaye was in her mid-20s at the time, and had moved back in with her parents while she started taking estrogen, getting laser hair removal, wearing women's clothes in public, changing her name and documents, and coming out to a widening circle of acquaintances.
 
Because they're so short, each comic is a little vignette of a single mood or incident. There's a mix of joy and self-acceptance with various forms of awkwardness and unpleasantness. I found a lot of Kaye's experiences really relatable, some from when I was first coming out myself, and some still today. A consistent metaphor is that taking estrogen and transitioning is like going through puberty again, with all the doubt and awkwardness that entails.
 
Kaye has a lot of self doubts - she worries that others will see her as a man playing dress-up, she frets about visible stubble, she's self-conscious about her voice. Sometimes she gets misgendered, even when she looks her most femme; other times she fears she will be, but then it's fine. Sometimes she hates her reflection. There are a few comics about public bathrooms - being afraid to come out of a stall when someone else is there, worrying what a friend will think when you're both in there at the same time. Kaye's parents are supportive, but there's one family member who's distant now, and she misses their friendship.
 
I think that for a lot of trans people, the process of figuring out what it is you're feeling and trying to decide what to do about it, is inherently isolating. You're doing a lot of introspecting, thinking about some of your most uncomfortable memories and emotions, and imagining how you might be able to feel better in the future. And you yourself might be the only trans person you know personally. It's easy to feel alone. 
 
Coming out, starting to socially and medically transition, hopefully does make you feel better. It's also different from anything you've done before, and it's new for your friends and family too. I think one of the most valuable things about a book like Super Late Bloomer is that it reminds you you're not alone, that others have felt what you're feeling, have done what you're now doing. You may be different from most of the people you know, but there are others like you, and things went mostly okay for them, and they can for you too. 

One Week in January

 
  
One Week in January

New Paintings for an Old Diary
by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

2024

 

  

I think it's just a thing that happens, in your 40s, to find old diaries and letters and things. I found a bunch the last time I moved. Over the past few years, I've heard from several old friends from college, because they found something like that and thought of me. Artist Carson Ellis made a discovery of her own, a diary she kept for a week in 2001, at the beginning of the new year, starting on the first day she moved into her new apartment in Portland. 
 
One Week in January is that diary, with the addition of illustrations showing the people and sights from that time in Ellis's life. If you don't otherwise know her (she's the author and illustrator of several children's books, for example), Carson Ellis is married to Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. 

 

In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were best friends and neighbors living in tiny studio apartments on a converted warehouse. The Decemberists had self-released their first EP, were starting to play their first live shows, and Meloy was writing 'Grace Cathedral Hill', a song that would go on their first full album, Castaways & Cutouts. 

 

Ellis had a crush on Meloy, while he was going on casual dates with several other girls in their social circle. She was trying to support herself as an artist, working on a couple big paintings, and getting smaller gigs making posters and flyers and the like. Already, she was making all the promotional art the Decemberists needed.

 

In January 2001, I was halfway through my first, very lonely year of college. I didn't get the courage to tell anyone I was trans until the start of my sophomore year, that fall. Later, in my senior year, I lived in a studio apartment about the same size as the one Ellis describes, although my building had private bathrooms and only the kitchen was shared. I went to a Decemberists' concert while I was in college, so only a couple years after Ellis wrote her diary, when they were still a small enough name to play at a bar instead of a larger concert venue, (though large enough that I'd heard of them).

 

image by Carson Ellis

 

Ellis's diary is surprisingly detailed and specific, and (in her own judgment, stated in the introduction) kind of boring. He diary captures her sharing meals with friends, trying to get work as an artist, checking her email to find nothing new, dealing with the hassle of getting her phone line set up, and on the last few days of the week, going out on the town and trying to have a good time with her friends, despite everyone's lack of spending money.

 

One Week in January is the kind book I think you can probably only make and have an audience for if you're already famous. The paintings Ellis made for the book do a lot to elevate a concept that would otherwise probably only merit a zine. I say this, but I am in fact glad I read it. It reminds me of a similar time in my own life, especially my last year of college and first year couple years of grad school, a time that was emotionally fraught and painful, but also full of nights out and fumbling attempts to create an adult identity. Ellis's paintings show the kind of scenes I used to take photos of, friends I was hanging out with, views of the city I encountered during the day and wanted to hold onto. It's a good book for starting a new year.

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

Alphabetical Diaries

 
 
Alphabetical Diaries

by Sheila Heti

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024

 

 

The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. But that original document was doubly transformed. First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. It reads a bit like poetry. Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order.
 
There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. Without any instructional purpose.
 
What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. But I don't really know that for sure.
 
She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. Or maybe just fling with a woman. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. I feel like I'm doing that here too. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book.
 
Heti writes about her writing. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. What kind of person. How she wants to live. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes declarative sentences. Instructions to herself. She writes about money troubles. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. A noun phrase. A different noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. That stand alone here with no context. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.
 
Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. Which isn't surprising, really. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.' Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third.
 
I really enjoyed this one. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. But this is a really good gimmick! A good idea, executed well. I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. I worry about that myself, all the time. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. If it looks normal too?

 

 

A different noun phrase. A good idea, executed well. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third. A noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.

 

Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. But I don't really know that for sure. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book. But that original document was doubly transformed. But this is a really good gimmick!

 

Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. 

 

Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. 

 

First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. 

 
Heti writes about her writing. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. How she wants to live. 

 

I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. I feel like I'm doing that here too. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. I really enjoyed this one. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. I worry about that myself, all the time. If it looks normal too? In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. Instructions to herself. It reads a bit like poetry. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. 

 

Or maybe just fling with a woman. 

 

She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes about money troubles. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. She writes declarative sentences. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.'

 

That stand alone here with no context. The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. 

What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. What kind of person. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. Which isn't surprising, really. Without any instructional purpose.

Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.

Wuhan Diary

 
 
Wuhan Diary

Dispatches from a Quarantined City

by Fang Fang

translated by Michael Berry

Harper Collins

2020

 

 

Wuhan Diary is a book that collects a series of 60 daily social media posts by the Chinese author Fang Fang that she made from her apartment in Wuhan, starting at the beginning of a strict mandatory city-wide lockdown in late January 2020, and lasting until late March when the re-opening date was announced.
 
Last year, I read Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun, a journalist who entered Wuhan just after the lockdown lifted, and who interviewed people from a variety of stations in life about what they did and how they survived. If you were only going to read one account of the Wuhan quarantine, I would recommend Murong's. Fang Fang's diary has value as a direct account at the time things were happening, and Murong notes that she inspired him to do his project, but she's also just one person, a fairly affluent older woman with a lot of friends and family members able to deliver food to her doorstep. Her experiences in isolation were not too different from mine! But Murong was able to interview a doctor, a delivery person, an unlicensed cab driver - people who had a much more direct experience with the coronavirus outbreak.
 
Each day, Fang Fang notes how long the outbreak has been going on, talks about the weather, discusses whatever news about the coronavirus has been making the rounds that day (often the death of a doctor or another public figure), she shares updates about how she's getting food and how her family members are doing, she comments on the latest specific rules of the lockdown, she reports on conversations she's had with friends who are doctors or who know other important information, she calls on her readers to follow the quarantine procedures and help each other as best they can.
 
And, as time goes on, her diary comes to be dominated by a few other topics - questioning the government's early inaction on the coronavirus, calling on government officials and hospital administrators who made mistakes to admit them and resign, talking about the lengths she has to go to publish each new day of her diary when her social media accounts have been suspended and each new post is often taken down by the time the next day's goes up (due to her large audience resharing her words, they stay in circulation, but corporate or government censors try to limit her reach), and responding to the nationalist 'ultra-leftist' trolls (who sound a lot like America's alt-right) who denounce her, threaten her, slander and lie about her, and who generally attack anyone who shares negative information or who criticizes the government.
 
Especially early on, when the lockdown has just started, and the diary itself has not become a topic of discussion, Fang Fang's experiences in quarantine remind me a lot of my own early isolation in mid-March 2020. Like me, she started off fairly optimistic - a two-week shutdown that will stop person-to-person transmission and reveal all the people who are already infected but haven't shown symptoms yet, allowing them to get treatment. Like me, like a lot of us, I think, she quickly realized it wouldn't be that easy, and that the quarantine period would need to be longer, and was forced to stare into the blank space where the future used to be and wonder what would happen next.
 
Early on especially, but kind of throughout her diary, Fang Fang remains pretty optimistic that the quarantine will work, the coronavirus will be brought under control if not defeated, and she mostly has a very vocal, positive faith that people are trying their hardest, doing their best, and that people cooperating with government regulations would be the cause of an eventual return to normalcy. Honestly, this annoyed me, and at times made me feel sick. I don't want to be unfair to her, especially how much she got pilloried by Chinese readers for the opposite reason, but her positivity was sometimes upsetting to me.
 
It's also hard to square with her acknowledgment that the city government of Wuhan and the national government of China both did everything in their power to hide the existence of the virus, to deny that it was contagious, to conceal how many patients were coming into the hospitals and how many doctors and nurses were getting sick and dying while treating them. They knew, for sure, by the end of December 2019, and should've know weeks sooner, and instead of announcing the existence of the virus and trying to keep it contained, they attempted to keep it secret and allowed it to spread around China and across the world. For at least 20 days, the Chinese government allowed mass events and huge movements of people associated with New Years festivities, and during those 20 days, any chances of preventing a pandemic were lost.
 
Arguably the American government, and our largest agricultural businesses, are doing the same thing, right now, with the bird flu. If H5N1 becomes another pandemic, it won't be because it evolved too fast for anyone to stop, it will be because everyone chose to prioritize secrecy and quarterly profits over making any real attempt to prevent another plague. (Incidentally, this is the actual reason for the much-vaunted high price of American eggs right now, even if none of our politicians will say that out loud.)
 
There's a sick dramatic irony to reading Wuhan Diary, because by mid-March, just as America was going into a panic, the new coronavirus cases in Wuhan were finally (and only temporarily) going down to zero. By the end of the diary, Fang Fang's city is about to reopen and she thinks her life will go back to normal. And meanwhile, the worst was still yet to come, not just for Wuhan or China, but for the whole world.
 
Fang Fang also thinks the ultra-leftists and the people within the government who pushed for secrecy will be discredited, that they still might be forced to resign, and that the public will turn away from them and demand something better. Staring down the gun barrel of my own dark future, I admire her hope and optimism. But again, there is terrible dramatic irony in knowing that the censors and authoritarians were actually empowered, that Xi Jinping was about to start a massive consolidation of power, making China less free and less democratic, and probably more like what the ultra-leftists want it to be. I fear similar changes are coming to America, and I can't muster any optimism of my own right now.

EarthBound

 

EarthBound

by Ken Baumann

Boss Fight Books

2014 

 

 

When I was a kid, in the 90s, I had a Super Nintendo, and for awhile, a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Games had basically the same price back then that they do today, usually $50 new, which is sort of incredible when you consider how much inflation has happened since then, and the general purchasing power of 1990s dollars. Even more incredible, a lot of the SNES games I owned, I got by saving up my allowance, $5 a week, for like 2½ months per game. Because of Nintendo Power, there were a lot of games I knew about and was fascinated by that I never had the opportunity to purchase. One of those was the game EarthBound, a weirdly postmodern rpg about modern American kids who awaken psychic powers, and travel the country saving it from aliens.
 
EarthBound the book is the first in the Boss Fight Books series, and the author, Ken Baumann, is the graphic designer for the whole series. I read another of these last year, for the game Spelunky, that was written by the game's creator, Derek Yu. The Spelunky book was excellent, combining insight about the game and the decisions that went into making it with biographical details about was going on in Yu's life at the time, and how that impacted the game too. EarthBound also blends writing about the game with the author's memoir, but the problem here is that Baumann isn't the game's designer, he's just some guy.
 
Technically, Ken Baumann is a very minor celebrity. He was an actor on the show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and when the show ended, he helped found this book series, and created Sator Press, which has since been acquired as an imprint of my favorite Ohio indie press, Two Dollar Radio. In his early 20s, he had a major health scare that almost killed him. His life story is moderately interesting, moreso than mine. But with respect to EarthBound the game, he's just some guy, and all the pages he spends talking about his biography are pages he doesn't spend talking about the game, its influences, its cultural impact, etc.
 
Some of it seems relevant! Baumann is about a decade younger than me, a Young Millennial instead of an Old Millennial, but he was also a 90s kid, and he did buy a copy of EarthBound and play it back then. He bought it again and played it again when, after about 20 years out of circulation, Nintendo re-released EarthBound as a downloadable game for the WiiU, which gave the game a new and much larger audience, including a lot of people like me and Baumann, who remembered our childhood fascination with it. So the parts about Baumann's life when he first got the game do help to inform his reactions to it, especially things like his engagement with things like horror movies and 90s gross-out humor that were part of the same cultural milieu that gave rise to EarthBound. But a lot of this felt like Baumann used the existence of the book as an opportunity to write about himself in a way that only occasionally contributed to the ostensible purpose of the project.
 
EarthBound is a game about kids on a journey. The hero, Ness, discovers he has psychic powers the same night a meteor crash lands in his town, and aliens kidnap some of his neighbors. Ness uses baseball bats and yo-yos as weapons. He stays in hotels, calling home when he needs money, or feels lonely or homesick. He joins up with a psychic girl who he rescues after she was kidnapped for her powers, and later with a child prodigy and a young Tibetian monk-in-training. The mechanics of the game are similar to the Final Fantasy series, but the visuals are a distorted 1950s Americana (50s revival was an important element of 80s culture), and the style is surreal and parodic, closer to Thomas Pynchon or Philip K Dick than to Tolkein or D&D. And at several key points, the game breaks its own rules to create unique, patience-testing challenges, like a door that can only be opened by not touching the controller for several minutes, a special item you can only receive as a random drop by defeating hundreds of extra enemies, or a boss fight that's won not by fighting, but by prayer.
 
Baumann structures the book around a walkthrough of the game, and his dual experiences playing it as a kid and an adult. He does talk about cultural influences on the game, and its tepid reception in the American market in 1994. I would have liked more of that, honestly, especially since he had no real access to information about how the game was made, or any way to interview anyone involved with making it. (Though both would've been nice, if he could've managed it!) And while I found the amount of autobiography to be excessive and distracting, he did at least manage a close parallelism between the events of the game and the way he ordered telling the events of his own life. Someone a little more interested in the author than I was might read this and see a real achievement. It's definitely a better book about Ken Baumann than it is a book about EarthBound. I'm left wondering if Yu's was the best book in the series, and if all of them lean so heavily into memoir, or if others more closely resemble the journalism of the 33⅓ series.

Mudlark

 
 

Mudlark

In Search of London's Past along the River Thames

by Laura Maiklem

Liveright

2019

 

 

Mudlark combines journalistic accounts of specific mudlarking trips author Lara Maiklem took while writing this book, memoirist accounts of both her earlier life, how she got into the hobby, descriptions of her own and other mudlarks' notable finds, the laws governing treasure hunting in England, the effects of climate change on the river, bits of British history, and imaginative accounts of how people might've used (and lost) some of the items she finds. 'Mudlarking' here refers specifically to searching the muddy shoreline of the Thames, in England, at low tide.

The book is organized, kind of, by location, starting at the Tidal Head where the river Thames first starts rising and falling with the tides, passing west to east through London, and ending at the Estuary where the river flows into the North Sea. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from British literary history, mostly unflattering descriptions of mudlarks from times when they were very poor and collected river debris to resell, as a career, out of economic necessity, a far cry from Maiklem and other modern mudlarks, who are hobbyists, mostly treasure hunting as a leisure activity.

Each chapter also has another theme or two, although Maiklem moves from thought to thought without being strongly bound to a single topic. I imagine this conversational style would make Mudlark an enjoyable audio book. I think I would've preferred the book to be a bit more structured, though I acknowledge that as personal preference. But my favorite chapters were the ones with the strongest themes, like 'Hammersmith,' which is mostly about a famous lost font that the original typesetter dumped in the river rather than giving to his business partner. That story's been in the news in the last few years.

The thing I think would've liked best, I think, is if the book had included photographs. Maiklem is acting a bit as an amateur archaeologist and hobbyist museum curator - I would've liked to see the shore, and more of her found objects than fit on the cover. Her descriptions are very good! But photos would've added something.

Photos would especially drive home a point she makes over and over - that nearly everything she finds is either broken or very small, or both. She finds buttons, beads, pins, coins and metal tokens, parts of clay pipes, and an awful lot of fragments of glass bottles and pottery vessels. Almost nothing is large or whole. Some things get lost in the river, many are thrown away because they're already damaged, and while the anoxic mud preserves, time and salt water both destroy. Maiklem is a treasure hunter, but these are treasures for their historic and sentimental value, not because they're worth a lot of money.

I think lots of kids have collections like Maiklem did, of interesting looking rocks and shells and other found objects, though hers sounds much larger and better tended than mine was. There was a book I loved as a kid, a guide to treasure hunting, that was fully illustrated, and I checked out over and over from the school library. I never got into the real thing, but the vicarious, imaginative thrill of discovery is part of what I like about games like D&D. I'd kind of hoped I would like Maiklem's book the way I did that one as a kid, which was probably too much to ask for. But it was interesting to see what the real life of an actual hobby treasure hunter looks like.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

 
 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel

by Zoe Thorogood

Image Comics

2022

 

 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.

I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.

There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.

Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.

I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.

The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.

Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:

"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."

"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."

I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.

Ducks

 

Ducks
Two Years in the Oil Sands

Drawn & Quarterly

2022

 

 

Ducks is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton, author of the Hark! A Vagrant webcomics. I absolutely love her silly little comics, poking gentle fun at history and literature. I believe she's also written a pair of children's books about kings and ponies. So a 400 page memoir about the time she spent working in the Canadian oil industry to pay off her student loans is something of a departure from the work she's most famous for. It is depressing and bleak, and a work of unreciprocated empathy for the men who work there full-time. And it is a masterpiece, a thoughtful and mature work by an artist at the top of her form.

 

At first glance, Ducks resembles Beaton's other projects. The character drawings have her signature look, and she paces her storytelling so that each page or 2-page spread contains a single complete vignette. But this is a different sort of story. Beaton catalogs her personal experiences, but she also examines the economic and geographic inequalities that send so many people like her, from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the east, over to dangerous and demanding (but well-paid) blue collar jobs in Alberta in the west.

 

Beaton also looks at the gender inequality that structures the experiences of women working in these labor camps, where they are outnumbered 50-to-1, and where whatever fraction of the men engage in sexual harassment (half? less?) are numerous enough that she is stared at, propositioned, and verbally harassed all day every day; numerous enough that men pop into her room whenever her door is unlocked, and her door-handle rattles in the night as they check to see if they can get in under cover of dark; that she is assaulted more than once by men who suffer no consequences for their actions. 

 

Other reviews mention the harassment, but to my mind, it is the thing this book is about, even as she addresses other topics. She remembers incident after incident, recounts anecdote after anecdote. Across the 400-pages, most of them show her being harassed, or show her trying to process and understand it.

 

Katie has just finished college, and wants to try to become a professional artist, but thinks that to do that, she needs to pay off her student loans so she'll have the financial room to take risks. Everyone in Nova Scotia grows up knowing of relatives who went west, where the jobs are, to provide for their families, and so she decides to do the same. 

 

Katie gets advised to try for a job in the tool crib, where she will check out and receive back equipment from the people working in the field, and she manages to get hired for a spot. Initially she also waitresses in town to help cover the costs of her travel and rent. The harassment at work is immediate, overwhelming, bewildering, and when she tries to ask some of the older women about it, they tell her it's a compliment, tell her to toughen up, try to set her up on dates with some of the younger men.

 

There are plenty of men who are polite to her, who show surprising kindness when she needs it most, like working a shift on Christmas. There are men who are her friends. But day in and day out, her most common experience with men is them sexually harassing her.

 

Katie moves to a new company to make more money, faster. She's going to be living onsite at a work camp, where her lodging and meals will be free. The men there are lonelier, more desperate, more willing to violate her boundaries. 

 

Katie starts to help her older sister and one of her college friends get jobs in the admin office. She's insistent that they not work exposed in the tool crib, like she does. Between then and when they arrive, she is sexually assaulted, twice, at weekend parties. She becomes understandably depressed and anxious. She blames herself, and feels responsible for what she's bringing her sister and friend into.

 

After the other two arrive, Katie's not alone, and she feels better for awhile. Her sister confronts her about her depression, and she tells her what happened. She takes a break to work at a museum, but can't afford both rent and her loan payments, and so returns, this time to an office job too. In the office, she is more insulated from the harassment, although it never really stops. She has space to think, and tells her friend what happened too.

 

While Katie is working in the office, another company, the first one she worked for, is responsible for a major spill that kills thousands of ducks. The incident that radicalizes her more is seeing a video of a First Nations woman talking about how the oil industry is operating on, polluting, ruining her people's land, and making her people sick. Katie realizes that she has participated in this harm, a fact that Beaton also grapples with in the author's note at the end.

 

Later Katie and her friend begin trying to tell their stories of being harassed. Many are unsympathetic. Others seem quick to want salacious detail, and to demonize the men. Katie refuses to speak to a reporter like that - she blames the working conditions and the companies who create them, and thinks that middle-class men from the city would act the same if put in the same environment. She doesn't want to hurt men like her dad, cousins, uncles, by helping to stereotype them based on region, ruralness, and social class. Nor does she want to defame the many men who've been kind to her here. As Katie's friend tells her, it's a shame her empathy for the men isn't reciprocated in their behavior toward her.

 

Eventually, Katie pays off her loans and returns home immediately, moving back in with her parents with no more debt, but also nothing in the bank.

 

Throughout the work, we see Katie and others comment on all the dust they're breathing, the chemicals they're exposed to. We see them worry about the long-term effects. In the author's note at the end, we learn that someone who appears prominently in the story got cancer around the time Beaton began writing this book, and died young before it was published.

 

One of Katie's, and I suppose Beaton's, preoccupations throughout the book is the question of why so many of the men act the way they do. Katie does not want to be flirted with by people who she wouldn't like back home, people who wouldn't like her back at their home, if she weren't one of the only women they ever see, people who she thinks really don't like her, but are just bored and desperately lonely, and want to use her as a means to an end. Unlike Katie, most of the workers, men and women alike aren't there for just a few years. The question of who you are at work versus who you are back home becomes more complex when home becomes a place you only get to visit, and work becomes the place you live.

Spelunky

 
Spelunky
by Derek Yu

Boss Fight Books

2016

 

 

I think Boss Fight Books aims to be for video games what the 33⅓ series is for music. Both series pick titles at the intersection of critical darling and indie fave and tell the history of its production. Spelunky is more or less unique for this format, because author Derek Yu is also the designer of the game. Usually they're written by journalists, critics, or other musicians / video game designers. (I think... Although I've looked into both series, truthfully, the only other one I've read is 33⅓'s history of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.)

 
Yu describes the creation of the original pixelart freeware Spelunky, its unexpected success, and then the re-creation of the upgraded Spelunky for the X-Box. 

 
Yu programmed the original Spelunky using the GameMaker software. He'd previously made some small games himself with other engines, then worked with a programming partner to make Eternal Daughter and Aquaria - they wrote the code while he focused on the art and design. For this first version of Spelunky, the software acted a bit like a programming partner. 

 
Yu's biggest innovation, and the idea that launched a mini-renaissance of other games with the same inspiration, was to marry the difficulty and random level generation of roguelike games to the mechanics and art of platformers like Mario. The theme of the game is an explorer armed with whip, bombs, and rope, delving deeper and deeper into a cave system in search of treasure. Each time he dies, the cave map is randomly redrawn. 

 
I've played that version of Spelunky over 1000 times. A winning game lasts maybe 20 minutes, but a losing game, which is probably over 99% of them, goes much quicker, sometimes only a minute or two. Yu talks about the way he drew inspiration from classic arcade games, and how he tried to use the positive features of both halves of his genre mash-up to correct the flaws in the other, resulting in a game that's neither too complex, nor too repetitive.

 
After he released the original Spelunky to great acclaim in the indie PC gaming world, Yu was offered a chance to make an upgraded version for the X-Box. It was a project he thought could be completed in a year, but actually took three, even with a new programming partner to write the upgraded code. Yu discusses both the difficulty and the thrill of finishing a project, despite the obstacles to completing anything that's long and complex.

 
Yu talks about more of his design decisions, including some of the many secrets and surprises he filled the new version of the game with. One benefit of the game's popularity is that the fan community found them and shared the news with each other, creating a sense of exploration that fits well with the caving theme.

 
He also talks about the game's critical reception, both positive and negative, including from players who thought it was too hard, and a feminist critique of the original game's helpless blonde damsel.

 
I found Yu's account inspirational. In addition to learning more about a game I've really enjoyed, I feel like he has also told a more universal story about starting a new creative project, nurturing it, and bringing it to completion.

Helcome to St Hell

 
Welcome to St Hell
My Trans Teen Misadventure
by Lewis Hancox

Graphix
2022

 

 

Welcome to St Hell is a graphic memoir by a British trans guy, covering his teen years, as he shifted from thinking of himself as a tomboy, then a lesbian, and finally as a man. Hancox is from a working-class community in northern England (St Helens, aka St Hell,) and both his narration and the dialogue is written in the local vernacular.

 
Present-day Hancox inserts himself in the narrative, to point out times he wishes he'd been kinder to himself, and to interview the present-day versions of his family and friends about what they now think of some of the events depicted. His choice to tell the story in this way feels unique among the memoirs I've seen.

 
Hancox is only a couple years younger than me, and seems to have been grappling with his feelings about his gender around the same time I was, both in terms of stage-of-life and in terms of the calendar year.
Hancox's friends and family were basically supportive from the start (though they felt some initial confusion and reticence too) - most of his struggles are with his own feelings, and with not really knowing that what he feels has a name and is a viable path through life. Living in the same early-internet era, I also had to figure out how my teenage sense that 'I wish I could be a girl' could be translated into a fulfilling life as an adult woman.

 
In telling his own story, I think Hancox gets at some relatively universal feelings of being trapped in a small town where you don't know how to live the sort of life you want, of trying to figure out who you want to be as a person, of worrying about whether the people who knew you when you were young will still accept you as you change into an adult.

Blankets

 
 
Blankets
by Craig Thompson

Drawn & Quarterly
2003
 

 

20 years old this year, Blankets is a graphic memoir that tells the story of the author's strict Evangelical childhood, his first love, and how he eventually outgrew both relationships. It's moderately famous, and something that I think is sometimes credited with helping to popularize independent comics in the 2000s.
 

There's a central narrative that's told in order, but time moves subjectively. We return over and over to Thompson's painful memories of his childhood, when he shared a bed with his younger brother, their parents were harsh disciplinarians, and a babysitter abused them. Thompson remains haunted by guilt for not being a better brother - from growing up and out if their early closeness, and for failing to protect him from the adults who hurt them both.

 
In his rural high school, Thompson is bullied for having long hair and being sensitive and artistic. (He's not gay, just grunge.) He feels even more an outsider at the church camp he attends every winter - he's still bullied, the other kids come from better-off families, and he seems to be the only one there who's really devout. But at camp he meets Raina, a sensitive artistic girl, and the two of them become fast friends.

 
Because Raina's parents are also conservative Christians, Thompson gets permission to visit her at home in Marquette, Michigan for two weeks. She greets him with a handmade quilt. Raina's parents are getting a divorce, and she does a lot of the care work for her two adopted siblings (who both have Downs Syndrome) and her infant niece (because her recently married biological sister wants more time alone with her husband.)
 

Thompson and Raina spend all their time together, he helps her with her caretaking responsibilities, and at night, at her request, he sleeps beside her before sneaking back to the guest room each morning just before her parents wake. Over several days, they work up the courage to kiss, then make out, then, if not actually 'have sex,' then something very similar. They make plans that Thompson will come back after high school graduation, live with Raina, work in her father's construction company. The two weeks span at least half the book, their brief time together seeming to last forever, the way it must have felt at the time.

 
Afterward, we see Thompson and Raina try to maintain a long-distance relationship by phone, begin to grow apart, break up, stop talking entirely. We also see him begin to question his faith, and during seminary, lose it. Throughout the book, child and high-school-age Thompson quotes Bible verses related to his current situation. His sexual love for Raina is maybe the first thing that really makes him question his faith, but other doubts come from the strictness and intolerance of the church. Learning the history of Biblical translation is the nail in the coffin. He moves to a city, gets a job, and resumes his art. He also reconnects with his younger brother, now an adult too.

 
Thompson's lines are fluid and expressive. Almost the entire book takes place in the winter, beneath the snow, another kind of blanket, along with the one from his childhood bed, and the one he shared with Raina. Thompson's love and faith are both incredibly intense. There's something comforting, in the final part of the book, about seeing that intensity reach a fever-point and break, seeing him healing and leading a calmer, healthier life afterward.

The Third Person

 
The Third Person

by Emma Grove

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

The Third Person is a graphic memoir, which tells the story of a trans woman in her early 30s who goes to a therapist to get prescribed hormones, and instead spends most of a year being treated for Dissociative Identity Disorder and multiple personalities.

To be clear, by Grove's own account, she did have DID, so this was not like, a confused therapist mistaking transition for multiple personalities. But this also wasn't the book I expected to read. It's not a book about Grove being trans, it's a book about her having DID. That she is trans and should live as a woman are essentially taken as given by both Grove and her therapist. Being trans isn't quite incidental to her story - it's why she thought therapy, and homophobic bullying as a child is a key part of why she began dissociating - but it's certainly not central either.

 
Although The Third Person is a little over 900 pages, it reads quickly. Grove's art is cartoony, but very effective at depicting facial expressions and body language, so we see when her therapist is skeptical, confused, exasperated, etc, and you can virtually always tell which personality is dominant in each moment.

 
The first 100 pages show a scene of tween Grove trying to hide her crossdressing from her family, and then a long scene of teen Grove having blackouts and a second personality during a stressful social event. There's also, in montage form, a few pages showing her life working during the day as a guy and going out at night as a woman.

 
The final 200 show Grove after dropping her therapist. She buys a DID workbook and uses it to work through her traumatic memories. She gets a new therapist who helps her finish the process of reintegration. And she finally gets to live full-time as a woman.

 
In between are 600 pages of dialogue between Grove and her therapist. This is not how I wish she'd structured her story. I find this pacing really odd, but I guess this interaction is what she wants her book to be about, with the rest of her life collapsed into prologue and epilogue before and after. The therapist first suspects she has DID, then spends a long long time suspecting that she's faking having multiple personalities to get attention, then trying to treat her, but by that point, the two have accumulated too much history of negative interactions for the therapist's change of heart to matter. So finally she leaves.
 

One thing worth noting if you decide to read it. At times, Grove seems unbelievably obtuse in her inability to understand the therapist's suspicions and accusations. (It certainly doesn't help that always answers her questions with questions, like 'Why do YOU think I'm saying I think you're lying to me?') But a thing Grove the author never explicitly points out, although the therapist says something about it once, ironically to justify his suspicions, is that one effect of her mental illness is that it prevents her from understanding someone pointing out her illness. If she dissociates to protect herself from unpleasant knowledge, then of course she is 'absent' at key moments to protect herself from being made to understand how dissociating is harming her. 

 
Without understanding that though, you'll find yourself asking 'how can she possibly think he's accusing her of pretending to be trans to get attention when he's OBVIOUSLY accusing her of pretending to have multiple personalities to get attention?'

How to be Ace

 
How to be Ace

A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual

by Rebecca Burgess

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

2020

 

 

When I requested my copy of Gender Queer, the public library website recommended that I might also like How to be Ace, so I went ahead and requested that too.

 

How to be Ace is primarily a graphic memoir, although briefly between chapters and in a slightly longer section at the end, Burgess gives a sort of 'Asexuality 101' that defines a few terms, shows some of the variety of ways that asexual people understand themselves, and makes a case for the importance of both an identity label and greater understanding from others.

 
Asexuality refers to a lack of interest in and desire for sex and physical intimacy. It doesn't imply anything about one's gender, and actually, after reading this, I'd be interested to find an account by an asexual guy, because the expectations men and women face regarding sexuality are different enough that it must be different to be a guy who is ace.

 
Burgess is British, and based on when she experienced the Great Recession, maybe about 5-10 years younger than me. In addition to being ace, she also deals with an anxiety disorder that sometimes manifests as OCD.

 
She tells of being bullied as a kid, having trouble making friends in high school, but then transferring to an art college at 16 (instead of staying in high school to do her A levels - British schools are a bit different than in the US) where she finally finds a community of friends. She graduates during the Recession, can't make a living as an illustrator, and eventually gets a job as a housecleaner for the upper class (possibly a good outlet, since her OCD had manifested as obsessive cleaning), which still lets her work on her art in her spare time.

 
For a long time, she struggles with the idea that something is wrong with her. In high school, the other kids all become interested in talking about dating and sex, but she never does. She has no particular interest in depictions of sexuality in media, and is acutely aware of all the messages that people generally want sex, want to form close relationships, want to have sex within those relationships, and often perceive the quality of their sex life as a microcosm of the state of the relationship as a whole (and of course, generally those messages are conveyed more judgmentally than I just said them.) 

 
Burgess fears she isn't 'growing up' the way her peers are, and generally worries that she's 'broken' in some way. Even the therapist she sees for her OCD assumes that her sex drive will emerge after she learns to cope better with her anxiety. She tries dating a guy, but immediately begins avoiding him so they won't have to touch, eventually breaks up with him, and feels guilty about how she treated him. In college she gets close to a couple other people, but pulls away before getting close enough to date. After college, as a housecleaner, she eventually dates and moves in with another asexual woman. They have an emotionally intimate, non-physical relationship.

 

How to be Ace is probably teen-appropriate. It's much less graphic than Gender Queer, and Burgess's illustration style seems aimed at a younger audience than Kobabe's. I particularly liked the images of Burgess noticing characters on tv saying things like 'We've been on several dates but haven't had sex, maybe we aren't really a couple!' and 'We haven't had sex in 6 months, maybe he doesn't love me anymore!' The section at the end also notes that while Burgess herself mostly perceives a generalized cultural pressure to form sexual relationships, other ace people have experienced much more direct, personal pressure, including being sexually harassed or assaulted.