I like to think I’m flexible and adaptable – that I can figure out new things, incorporate them into my thinking, and move forward without a hitch. I’m probably wrong, though. We’re never the people we want to be or think we are. Over the past few months, I’ve been reading more French comics by…
If I wanted to be dismissive, I’d describe this book as collecting daily watercolor comics pages about French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim’s vacations in 2007. And that’s not untrue, but it misses the point. The whole Little Nothings series, as far as I can tell, is about quotidian life: small moments in a day that are…
Comics memoirs don’t have to be about something life-shattering that happened when you were younger. It just seems that way sometimes. And, to be honest, any book should be about something important: one old piece of fiction-writing advice is that a story should be about the most important thing that ever happened to that person….
I tagged this as “non-fiction” and “memoir,” but it’s isn’t, exactly. This is the story of Marguerite, a twenty-seven-year-old French woman who gets diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s written by Julie Dachez, who is now thirty-six and who was diagnosed with Asperger’s in 2012. So the reader’s assumption is that Marguerite has been constructed to…
No one’s story is as smooth and clear as it looks from outside. It might seem like someone has had only success after success, rising quickly, winning awards and conquering worlds at a young age. But you’d have to ask that person what it was really like. The Fire Never Goes Ou t is a…
When you’re talking about people who have an inordinate fondness for insects, you probably mean either God or E.O. Wilson. And only one of them is a person you can actually have a conversation with. (Well, Wilson is 91, and probably still busy enough that it would be tough to get some of his time…
Several hundred thousand people — mostly girls, mostly under the age of fifteen — already have very strong opinions on this book in particular and Raina Telgemeier in general, and it’s unlikely that anything this One Old Guy could say will shift any of them in the slightest. (And most of them love it and…
Disclaimer No. 1: I’m not related to Shannon Wheeler, as far as I know. We both carry an ancient Anglo-Saxon name, and probably have at least one ancestor in common, somewhere in the misty dawn of time, but there are a lot of Wheelers in this world. Disclaimer No. 2: Wheeler has a recent book…
This week’s marks eleven years since the passing of my late wife, Kimberly Yale. The best way to remember people, I’ve found, is through stories – stories you know or stories you’ve heard. Story is what I do. So here are some of the stories by which I remember Kim. Kim and I…
