Well. I am generally a fan of graphic biographies and memoirs, but this one was difficult for me. I can totally relate to the idea of revisiting your childhood diaries, as my mum is a prodigious diarist and I have maintained one most of my life too. But the structure of this book left me confused. Clearly Markoe is working on some stuff here. She shows a lot of discontent with her childhood, having what seems like a terrible relationship with her mother, especially, feeling like an outcast among her peer group, and yearning for relationships with boys but utterly failing—and feeling really shitty about it—until she was hanging out with artsy beatniks at the end of high school (in the mid-1960s). Considering that this is a woman who has made herself a fairly successful career as a comedy writer, this book is pretty bleak. I suppose many comedians have pretty sad, fucked up lives, so this shouldn’t be a surprise, but if this was supposed to be funny, I didn’t find it so. Also I kept getting thrown off by the order of the speech bubbles in sections with dialogue or exchanges between characters (mostly adult Markoe speaking to her younger self), and also the chronology, which jumped around a lot. I’ve read a fair amount of graphics and I found this a poor design choice—it really messed up the rhythm of the reading for me. Altogether it was fairly disappointing and I won’t be in any kind of hurry to read anything else she has written. ( )

Graphic novels are a relatively unexplored genre for me but every so often I see a review for one and think "That sounds like something I might enjoy." I'm not sure which site mentioned this book (I subscribe to a lot of blogs and websites that review books) but it sparked me to put a hold on this book. Good choice!

I've never heard of Merrill Markoe before but apparently she has some renown for writing for TV comedy shows. This book explores her school years based upon her memories and the diaries she kept at the time. The two do not necessarily over lap. Many of the things that she recorded in her diaries never lodged in her brain. Markoe explains that the hippocampus is where short-term memories get made into long-term memories. Not everything gets stored as long-term memories. Markoe turns this into a running gag throughout the book breaking the term hippocampus into two words, hippo campus, and drawing hippopotamuses hanging around a space that looks vaguely like a college campus. I thought that was a genius touch.

In a way this book brought back my own memories of growing up although Markoe and I certainly didn't share a common background. She was the oldest child in a Jewish family that lived in Jersey, Florida and California. I was the youngest child in a WASP family that lived on a farm in a rural area of Manitoba. And yet, there were lots of instances that I identified with. The obsession with weight, the imaginary romantic partners, the quest to find one's own distinct personality, etc. The relationship I had with my mother was not perfect but it was nowhere as fraught as Merrill's with her mother, thank goodness. It doesn't seem that she ever really resolved her feelings about her mother which is sad.

I'm sure almost every female, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, living situation, will find something to identify with in this book. I recommend it highly. ( )

There may be many (emphasis on "man") people who won't find anything charming or profound in found diaries from 1960s middle school girlhood. If so, bye. But if you relished Alison Bechdel's Fun Home memoir, here's another for you. This graphic novel is so honest and unique that it's a perfect read for any woman, girl, or even grandmother - we have all lived through these times, even if not in the same country or with the same hostile parents and miserable sibling. If you don’t see yourself in Merrill, then you could be her mom or her ever-changing best friends or someone who thought her life would truly begin once she moved from Miami to golden San Francisco (where the adolescent problems persisted but just in a cooler setting). Markoe's sometimes disturbing illustrations, her adult perspective on her diaries and on the seemingly unique circumstances of her upbringing - probably more common that she could know at the time - create a remarkable and unsettling reading experience. ( )

and teenager in the early 1960s.

For a graphic novel, it is text heavy with each page containing a typeset paragraph of insight from the author in the present day, a typeset diary entry, and a one-panel illustration or cartoon related to the diary entry. At 278 pages, it becomes a drag, especially when a lot of it revolves around crushes or favorite TV shows. Too often the word balloon placement makes it difficult to read the cartoon dialogue in the correct order.

There are some cool tidbits buried throughout, and it is amazing just how much the inner lives of children remain unchanged over the decades, as I recognized recurring themes and ideas from my childhood a decade later and my daughter's 40 years later.

It's a less weird version of Lynda Barry, whose text-heavy work doesn't really do much for me either. See also the similar Fab 4 Mania by Carol Tyler. ( )