Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.
A family steeped in 12-step recovery risks addiction to 12-step programs.
Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, 2008), who has provided illustrations for the New York Times, New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications, pairs deceptively simple drawings with transparently direct text. Though the book is divided into 12 chapters, it doesn’t really involve working all 12 steps until the last. Before that, Heatley delves deeply into a life that is as complex and messy as any, that refuses to untangle through easy epiphanies, and that doesn’t resolve itself the way readers may anticipate. Throughout his life, the artist has been drawn to—and suspicious of—12-step programs since his parents were involved in numerous ones, often simultaneously. He heard the jargon and witnessed the results as his mother transformed herself (at least temporarily) through Overeaters Anonymous and changed the family’s dynamic enough to divorce his father, who had issues with debt (and at least borderline sexual abuse of his sons). At various times, the author was addicted to pornography, spending, shoplifting, and attracting romantic attention. He and his wife fought frequently, most often over their financial instability but about his various 12-step programs as well, which she felt he was using as an escape from domestic tension. He felt he was becoming addicted to those arguments. He saw his brother walk a thin line between spiritual fervor and madness, and he resented the way that his mother responded to every complication in any of their lives with 12-step bromides. He supplemented his programs with therapy, and he found counseling and 12-stepping to be at odds with each other. “It was clear to me that I had a spiritual disease,” he admits, yet finding the cure proved confusing. This graphic narrative, rich in detail and reflection, shouldn’t be read quickly in one sitting but rather savored.
Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-375-42540-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...
Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.
A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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