A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age.
How painting can save your life.
Celebrated book designer, nonfiction author (Cover, 2014, etc.), novelist (The Delivery, 2021, etc.), and now painter, Mendelsund recounts his struggle with depression in a journal that begins early in the Covid-19 pandemic and ends two years and some 100 new paintings later. At the outset of the pandemic and already suffering from serious depression, Mendelsund retreated with his family to a New Hampshire farmhouse where he began to paint for the first time in his life. The book’s opening lines cleanly telegraph the story to come: “Rain on the drive. The undersides of the leaves were bright. Coming up the road, the barn was the first thing I saw. Large, almost black; presiding over a farmhouse, shed, a murky pond, and a large, untended field that stretched off and off.” There is the looming darkness, along with the faintest glimmer of light. Painting, it turns out, will offer that light. Mendelsund’s short, staccato chapters and clipped sentences feel like the exhaustion of depression and space for what can’t be expressed in words, just as a barn studio makes space for art-making and recovery. Though reminiscent of Anne Truitt’s published journals (Yield, 2022, etc.), which grapple with art-making and life, and William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible (1990), Mendelsund’s book is singular in its quiet wit: “A sky so blue it came across as aggressively middlebrow. This depressed me further.” His humor, along with full-color reproductions of his startlingly good paintings, is solace from his sadness, both for the author and reader. He makes these paintings left-handed, sometimes under the influence. “My diligence in maintaining my incompetence has paid off. I have said my final fuck-you to expertise. Amazing.” And it is amazing. A kind of alchemical miracle: dilettante into artist, depression into creation, something slapdash into something wonderful.
A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781646222896
Page Count: -
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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