THE JOY OF SNACKING

In this graphic memoir, complete with recipes, a New Yorker cartoonist looks back on years of eating her way into adulthood.

Opening and closing with scenes from a gig as a 33-year-old burlesque dancer, Campbell shows off her experience as a stand-up comic with a quip-laden narrative in which she chronicles both her youth as a picky eater from childhood through college and a yearslong, riotously contentious, on-again, off-again relationship with a sometimes pushy, sometimes disturbingly sensitive foodie she dubs “E.” “My truest self is a 5-year-old,” she starts out, “legitimately terrified” of most food from a young age. But “I fucking LOVE Kraft cheese,” and so throughout ensuing trials and tribulations she inserts frequent recipes for comfort foods like Burnt Potato Chips (“pairs well” with gin and tonics and M&M’s). In art as busy and disheveled as her life, she crams friends, family, foods, and winningly ungainly images of her own figure, along with hand-lettered commentary and dialogue, into panels and montages that teem with informal line work and pop with colored highlights. Reflecting the classic stand-up’s truism that “people think it’s funny when I’m sad,” even when she’s listing her fears or turns to bulimia while wrestling with shame and depression at her weight, her tone is at its lowest only self-deprecatory. Anyway, it’s the high moments that best capture attention—from a wonderfully epiphanic sequence of reaction shots in the wake of her first primary school teacher’s announcement of “Snack Time!” and the mind-bending discovery that cream cheese wrapped in salami actually tastes good to a final view of her triumphantly twirling her pasties onstage while declaring a well-earned determination “to live my life the way that I want!”

Salty, crunchy, delicious fun.