Every so often in the life of a reader comes a book that changes everything. I know I’m being vague when I say “everything” but you’ll know in a minute that by everything, I mean everything – my entire approach to the limits of narrative, imagination and economy.
It was 2008 or so. After several years of doing rigorous lit crit, I had only just liberated myself from academic analysis, if only to immerse myself in copyediting academic books for Routledge (at least the salary helped with residual self-image issues). We were a small team of girls, readers all. The British Council library was down the road from our office.
Every other lunch hour, one or the other amongst us would need to borrow or return a book, and the rest of us would troop along, and then get late in the library. My friend Amrita and I were the most frequent offenders. We’d go to the library to borrow books and invariably get distracted.
One morning, Amrita brought along a book for me. It was Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, translated from French to English by her cousin, book editor Anjali Singh. I hadn’t heard of it then. It was only later that I would learn the fascinating story of how Singh acquired the translation rights for the book, after chancing across it on a friend’s bookshelf in Paris, thereby triggering the global success of not only the book but also the genre.
Amrita’s copy was her most prized possession, a beautifully produced, signed first edition. It was a testament to the progression of our friendship in bookish terms that she had permitted herself to part with it – if only for the weekend.
I remember that Friday evening clearly. After dinner, Saurav and I walked down to the PVR Priya complex in our neighbourhood, and sunk into the deep armchairs of a chocolatery we used to frequent (where Costa Coffee is now). We did not own any sofas of our own, and the brand new Choko La provided a cozy reading nook most days. It helped that Mr Singh’s independent bookstore Fact and Fiction was exactly a hundred steps away.
Over cinnamon hot chocolate, I read Persepolis, pausing now and then to pull my shawl closer or simply look out of the window. I had not known that it was possible to tell a story thus – using a narrative mode that was so stylish yet so moving, the black and white pictures revealing as much as they held back. Later, I found both volumes of Persepolis at Fact and Fiction. Eventually Embroideries and Chicken with Plums were added from Mr Singh’s shelves to ours.
My fascination for graphic memoirs remained over the years, though the acquiring of books goes through predictable ebbs-and-flows. It’s not the genre most easily available in bookstores either. As the year comes to an end and you battle the twin feelings (“Welcome Blank Slate!”/ “No, wait, don’t end on me just yet 2016!”) it suddenly seems about right to devote an entire week to the majesty of this form.
We’ve compiled for you a list of graphic memoirs to accompany you to the edge of time – as every New Year’s Eve feels – and back! Seven books, taking you all the way from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve.
Goodbye 2016.
Embroideries, Marjane Satrapi
Begin Christmas Day with the charming Embroideries, full of the smells and afternoons of growing up. While Persepolis is the account of Marji’s childhood and youth, Embroideries is an unconventional memoir. In this, the familiar Marji is at the edges, listening in, maybe adding a comment or two, and functions as merely the vessel for remembering the free-wheeling conversations about love, sex, betrayal and the peculiar oddness of every marriage, that took place on long afternoons lubricated by tea, within a circle of women: her grandmother, mother, aunt and women from the neighbourhood.
A wonderful, rambunctious book that portrays laughing, feisty voices from Marji’s past, Embroideries will doubtless remind you of the liminal possibilities of the lives of Iranian women in times of war, peace and everything in between, and transport you from the specifics of Iran to the particulars of your mother’s or your grandmother’s homes during afternoons of endless stories.
Blankets, Craig Thompson
Celebrate the feeling of blues that settles in immediately after the finality – and the excesses – of Christmas Day; embrace that hollow, sinking sensation, hold it close, and hunker down with this tome of a book. Touching six hundred pages, Blankets is nearly three times the size of most graphic novels, and it will keep you gripped for its entire length, with haunting black-and-white pen-and-ink sketches.
Craig grows up in the snowy Mid-West in a fundamentalist Christian household where becoming an artist is considered the worst sort of delinquency, and is routinely bullied at school. Away at church camp, he meets the radiant Raina, and the glories of first love transform them both – touching their lives of drudgery with a rare bliss. The end of the affair and the coming of age of an artist are perhaps the oldest stories in the book; Blankets executes it anew, with great honesty and heart.
Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s breakout book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was a memoir about growing up in a rambling Victorian house that her father, a third-generation funeral home director, high school teacher, and closeted homosexual, obsessively restored. Like Persepolis, it was a pioneering book. (The significance of Bechdel’s voice becomes apparent from the fact that except for Embroideries, every other book on this list comes with a blurb quote from her.) Are You My Mother? takes her literary-personal quest to a whole new level. If the “novel of ideas” were adapted as a “memoir of ideas”, and then encountered an original, gently probing, astonishingly intellectual voice, we’d get something like Are You My Mother?
At the heart of the book is Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, portrayed in the context of her relations with other women – her therapists and lovers – and her constantly evolving dynamic with art and books. Dappled with self-reflexivity, this story of her mother, a voracious readers and amateur actor trapped in an unhappy marriage, this memoir is as much about the adult Alison. It investigates the diverse influences of dreams, connections and concepts that changed her way of looking at the world, often filtered through the work of mavericks like Freud, Alice Miller (author of The Drama of the Gifted Child), the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Impossible to define and filled with ineluctable sophistication, Are You My Mother? will change the way you look at the mother-daughter narrative – and the graphic memoir – for ever.
Sisters, Raina Telgemeier
After the heavy stuff of the last few days, you suddenly remember how much fun the end of December used to be when you were a child, and time was infinite, only directed outward. To channel that feeling, turn to this graphic memoir for teens, created by Raina Telgemeier, whose stirring teen memoir Smile was a No. 1 bestseller on New York Times.
Raina and her little sister Amara disagree on virtually everything, until a road trip from California to Colorado, to attend a family reunion, forces them to confront misadventures and family secrets together. An utterly pleasant book that will, in its art, remind you of the comics you read as a child, and yet surprise you with its sudden moments of deep perception and insight into the hidden lives of families.
Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me, Ellen Forney
On December 29, the Pausha amaavasya, meant for remembering ancestors and reflecting upon the most natural darkness of all, long nights upon a moonless earth, you ought to surrender to the peculiar pull of Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me. A few months before turning thirty, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
A talented artist, she struggled to find the right medication that will not interfere with her creativity (her manic phases are supremely productive) but also protect her from crashing so terribly that she can barely get out of bed. A sensitive, humorous and searing account of Forney’s life following the diagnosis, interspersed with accounts of her manic searches into the lives of writers and artists who suffered from mood disorders (look at the graphic titled Appendix B) for nuggets of inspiration, Marbles is a book that’ll help you deal with the nights and days better, whether you are a tormented artist or a sanguine banker.
The Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf
A direct descendant of Persepolis, French-Syrian film-maker and cartoonist Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir of growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya and Hafez al Assad’s Syria, The Arab of the Future (Volume 1), is as timely as it is perspicacious. Sattouf, a former cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo, was born to an idealistic Sunni Syrian father, Abdel-Razak, and a French mother, Clementine. After completing his doctorate from Sorbonne, Abdel-Razak turned down a professor’s job at Oxford to accept one in Gaddafi’s communist Libya, at a moment of great pan-Arabist optimism for the future.
In The Arab..., the bossy eccentric Abdel-Razak, with his endless opinions and theories is the most likeable character, prejudice and all. The second volume has only just been published in English, and a further three have been planned by the author. Whether geopolitics is your thing, or your interest is piqued by an astute, empathetic portrayal of a muddled adult world from the point of view of a constantly displaced mixed-race child, you will find The Arab of the Future a fascinating read. Its edgy art-work (more cartoon than real-life), using a stark palette of colours for different corners of the world, is as unique as the deadpan reportage of the child, who is yet innocent of political correctness.
Relish, Lucy Knisley
For New Year’s Eve, I have reserved the most charming, hungry-making, positively delicious book of the lot, with the happy title Relish. Lucy Knisley’s chatty food memoir that celebrates, in her signature bright, friendly style (which I’ve enjoyed ever since her debut, French Milk, about flâneuring and eating in Paris), a Nora Ephronesque nostalgia of remarkable meals past. Growing up, first in an apartment in New York City, with parents who were both gourmets, and then in a farm with her mother in upstate New York, Knisley uses food as the prism through which to view a curious world.
While love and loss, anxiety and coming-of-age, education and travel are the deeper themes that underpin the contours of a well-lived life, Knisley’s delightful artwork, celebrating its essence through cooking, makes it look so alluring and effortless that your new year’s resolution for a full life will be to relish the days and savour the future – and, of course, cook the recipes lovingly illustrated after every chapter.
Happy New Year!
Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels, a PhD dissertation on the Natyashastra and most recently, of The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, co-written with husband Saurav Jha.