Graphic Novel Resource Guide: Memoirs

"Hornschemeier's exceptionally powerful work opens with a man drifting a la Superman in flight, sadly searching for someone, and pursued on the ground by whale-headed figures that try to drag him into an ocean. He is seven-year-old Thomas Tennant's father. His wife, Thomas' mother, has died of cancer, and he is adrift on a sea of grief and guilt. He eventually must go into residential therapy, leaving Thomas with an aunt and uncle. As for Thomas--who, as an adult, narrates the book while, as a child, he is its visual center--under a cape and lion mask that his mother gave him, he has become "the groundskeeper," picking up around the house, taking phone messages, and tending his mother's abandoned garden and her grave. Eventually, Thomas loses his father, too, in a shocking yet inevitable, strangely gentle climax." (Booklist review)

"Told with chilling realism in an unusual comic-book format, this is more than a tale of surviving the Holocaust. Spiegelman relates the effect of those events on the survivors' later years and upon the lives of the following generation...The Nazis, portrayed as cats, gradually introduce increasingly repressive measures, until the Jews, drawn as mice, are systematically hunted and herded toward the Final Solution." (School Library review)

"Together with the much-acclaimed first volume of Spiegelman's Maus (1987--not reviewed), this unusual Holocaust tale will forever alter the way serious readers think of graphic narratives (i.e., comic books). For his unforgettable combination of words and pictures, Spiegelman draws from high and low culture, and blends autobiography with the story of his father's survival of the concentration camps." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up." (Publisher's product description)

"With Fun Home, the artist draws her own story, also poignant, funny, and certainly real-life absurd. Mother is an actress turned housewife, while father teaches high school English and runs a funeral home (the "fun home," the children call it mockingly) on the side. Young Alison is pressed into helping with funerals and renovations on their gothic house, while pretending, along with parents and brothers, that they are a normal family. Yet why did her parents hate each other? Why was father so histrionic and mother so distant? As she untangles these mysteries, Bechdel skillfully pivots the tale in repeat takes around her father's perhaps-suicide. Gradually the secret is revealed, partly in metaphors of literature that brought daughter and father-now revealed as closeted gay-together at last before his death." (Library Journal review)

"This Jungian "comic drama" finds Bechdel investigating the quiet combat of another relationship: that of her distant, critical mother and her own tangled, self-defeating psyche. Bechdel's art has the same tightly observed aura of her earlier work, but with a deepening and loosening of style. The story, which sketches more of the author's professional and personal life outside of her family, is spiderwebbed with anxiety and self-consciousness...Though perhaps not quite as perfectly composed as Fun Home, this is a fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family. " (Publishers Weekly review)

"Inspired by a painting exercise, "One Hundred Demons," that she learned about at the library, Barry decided to exorcise memories and events that haunt her by trying it out in her primary medium, comics. Most of her demons arise from childhood traumas of the sort detailed in her weekly strip, "Ernie Pook's Comeek." They include old boyfriends, mothers and grandmas, people who lied to her, people she lied to, hippies, abused dogs, doing acid, and last year's presidential election." (Booklist review)

"As alienated kids go, Jin Wang is fairly run-of-the-mill: he eats lunch by himself in a corner of the schoolyard, gets picked on by bullies and jocks and develops a sweat-inducing crush on a pretty classmate. And, oh, yes, his parents are from Taiwan. This much-anticipated, affecting story about growing up different is more than just the story of a Chinese-American childhood; it's a fable for every kid born into a body and a life they wished they could escape." (Publishers Weekly review)

"Pekar has become a cult figure of the non-superhero comics world, transcending his beginnings in the 1970s underground comics scene with his unique narrative of Everyman's Ordinary Life that somehow engrosses and uplifts. He's an irascible yet lovable antihero, frank about his own warts as well as everyone else's. Pekar lets you know that real life isn't what the media tells you, but you can deal with it and keep going-a message both reassuring and empowering." (Library Journal review)

"Four powerful dramas recall tenement life in 1930s New York--an absolute must for fans of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth,and Isaac Singer. The storytelling is straightforward: sometimes heart warming, sometimes heart breaking. It's printed in a single sepia-colored ink, which adds to the nostalgic feel of the book and includes "A Contract with God," "The Street Singer," "The Supper," and "Cookalein." (Publisher's product description)

"With a lilting voice and a strongly etched fairy tale hand, writer/artist Yang weaves a riveting true-life tale of ancestral jealousies and familial woes from her father's recollections of growing up in China...Yang's story, which balances her own struggles with those of her ancestors without clumsily trying to equate them, echoes both with the tragic darkness of King Lear and the clean austerity of classical Chinese poetry." (Publishers Weekly review)

"The semiautobiographical story follows Farmer's alter ego, Laura, as she deals with her elderly father and stepmother, Lars and Rachel Drover, in the last few years of their lives. The couple become increasingly confined to their house and their memories, as minor medical problems are exacerbated by little accidents and their stubbornness, and the terrifying early flickers of dementia escalate." (NY Times review)

"Here he tells the decidedly grim but far from unique story of his own childhood. Many teens will identify with the rigors of growing up in a household of angry silences, selfish parents, feelings of personal weakness, and secret lives. Small shows himself to be an excellent storyteller here, developing the cast of characters as they appeared to him during this period of his life, while ending with the reminder that his parents and brother probably had very different takes on these same events. The title derives from throat surgery Small underwent at 14, which left him, for several years, literally voiceless." (School Library journal)