Merrill Markoe

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.… (mere)

I read this right after Speaker For The Dead by Orson Scott Card, so I was definitely up for something lighter, and for a short while my mood and the humor of the book carried me along quite nicely.

Then the characters started to get on my nerves. The protagonist is a whiny doormat. If she ever fully came to her senses she'd leave her self-deluded, pushy sister; her ego-centric mother; and on and off opportunistic boyfriend in a second. Instead we have to suffer through waiting for the boyfriend to leave her, her mother's get rich scheme to bear fruit, and her sister to become famous enough to lose interest. Yes, this book is just a tad short on character development.

In a nutshell, it's a sitcom put to paper, so one shouldn't expect much character development. Still, it's one thing to half-watch 20 minutes (taking out the commercials) of something as insipid as Friends, but quite another to have to devote my attention to a 270 page book of the same.

Still, it was rather funny in places, and that earns it two stars instead of one.… (mere)