WE SAW SCENERY

An Emmy-winning comedy writer's graphic memoir about her odyssey into diaries she kept as a young girl growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

When Markoe began looking through her girlhood journals, she writes, “I was amazed at how much it felt like I was reading about a stranger.” She discovered long-forgotten—and sometimes painfully embarrassing—entries detailing the minutiae of her daily life, such as a weight-loss recommendation from her doctor that sent her "spiraling into a lifetime of obsessive dieting.” More significantly, she encountered the outlines of her developing self: a girl "steeped in pop culture" who considered the TV her “best friend” and routinely fought her one-time "relentless adversary,” her brother. With a mixture of mortification and amusement, Markoe observes how her younger self faithfully recorded such events such as the Cuban missile crisis alongside those involving a string of unrequited loves that began in the fourth grade. During one especially hilarious romantic mishap, Markoe interpreted a Nazi salute a crush gave her as a sign of his undying affection. "On the cusp of 15,” she left Florida for San Francisco with her family. As the new girl, she quickly developed survival strategies that “put me at war with my parents.” Teenage angst eventually drove her to seek refuge in art, her diary, and humor, which she used to combat tensions with her parents that she did not escape until she went to the University of California at Berkeley. Markoe's bold, sometimes absurdist drawings and the often chiding conversations she imagines between her mature and adolescent selves enhance the comedy at the heart of this thought-provoking story about what happens when the wisdom of age confronts the follies and foibles of youth. “I wish I could say I became smarter about handling love relationships,” she writes near the end, “but a lifetime consumption of books and movies had taught me some very bad ideas about how it was all supposed to work.”

A memoir that is both relatable and subversive.