BURY ME ALREADY (IT'S NICE DOWN HERE)

A cartoonist reflects on the birth of her first child and how it upends her life.

In this appealingly candid graphic memoir, Wertz (Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story, 2023) returns with a very different kind of book: her pregnancy and entrée into motherhood. She opens in Petaluma, California, where she and her boyfriend, Oliver, are still adjusting to the quiet of small-town life. An unexpected pregnancy prompts a moment of self-reflection in Wertz. She wonders why she doesn’t feel more prepared, as her career is relatively stable and she and Oliver are on “the wrong side” of their mid-30s. A miscarriage at seven weeks renders the question moot but also clarifies things; she and Oliver try again, and, this time, the pregnancy results in the birth of their son, Felix. What distinguishes the book from the crowded shelf of new-parent memoirs is its unflinching catalog of everything else that goes wrong at once. The pregnancy unfolds against a backdrop of Northern California wildfires and, soon enough, a global pandemic, lending the book’s domestic anxieties an almost surreal scale. A life-altering accident, family trauma, and a hasty wedding round out what Wertz, with characteristic self-deprecation, presents as a perfectly ordinary disaster. The format is a happy mix: Cartoons, photographs, stick-figure doodles, and short prose essays sit side by side, toggling between slapstick and sincerity in a way that every parent will recognize. Wertz’s line work—spare, expressive, and very funny—carries as much emotional weight as the text. Her self-portrait as a wide-eyed, hapless protagonist navigating body horror and new parental love is, ultimately, a portrait of frazzled resilience.

A raw, honest, and frequently hilarious account of becoming a parent in the worst possible year.