“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

espite the roots of modern cartooning as a means of political and cultural satire, as well as the abundance of graphic narratives clearly written for “mature” audiences, comics are often mistakenly reputed to be reading material primarily meant for the young. Many cartoonists have had the perplexing experience of seeing their works advertised as children’s or young adult literature. During a 2011 interview, for example, Art Spiegelman claimed that when he first heard about parents and teachers sharing the Maus series with twelve year olds, he thought, “wait, that’s child abuse” (“Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus”). Indeed, a 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “In the Dumps,” composed by Spiegelman in collaboration with children’s book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, reflects the struggle Spiegelman had in coming to terms with this complex issue. Pictured walking together in the woods outside of Sendak’s Connecticut home, Sendak’s alter ego tells Spiegelman’s, “Kids books…Grownup books…That’s just marketing. Books are books!” (80).¹ As Spiegelman admitted in the 2011 interview, he eventually came around to an understanding of comics as “democratic—each person will take what he will.”

Parsing out the relationship between storytelling and age appropriateness is a complicated task. Many maintain the view that narratives composed as comics are automatically unsophisticated, or one-dimensional, and that such texts must therefore be intended for children. This outlook assumes, among other things, that children are incapable of reading complex or demanding works. The problematic association between youth culture and the comics medium as a whole endures, especially in North America, because of the popularity of mainstream superhero and action genres, which often cater to children and adolescents (at least as the starting point of an often lifelong attachment), the prevalence of animated films intended for young audiences, and the false presumption upheld by many of images as simple tools of communication and children as easy receptors of such simple transmissions.² In his introduction to a 2007 special issue of ImageTexT on “Comics and Childhood,” Charles Hatfield addresses this connection, which he describes as “both misleading and contentious.” As he writes, “the idea persists that comics are rooted in childhood, that is, that comics are grounded historically in children’s culture and psychologically in some longed-for, Edenic state of childlike carelessness, innocence, and simplicity.” As a case in point, among other pieces written for popular audiences Hatfield references “Not Funnies,” a July 11, 2004 article by Charles McGrath published in the New York Times Magazine. In his piece, despite recognizing the complexity of “graphic novels,” McGrath ultimately argues that, with comics journalist Joe Sacco as an exception, “this is a medium probably not well suited to lyricism or strong emotion…. [Comics instead] appeal to that childish part of ourselves that delights in caricature.”³

This mistaken approach to comics as a narrow genre, rather than a tractable medium, creates, in addition to other problems, practical difficulties in terms of the marketing and distribution of texts—as Sendak’s alter ego cuttingly intimates. For example, Lauren Weinstein’s graphic memoir, Girl Stories, published in 2006, was originally placed in the children’s picture-book section of Barnes and Noble, much to the dismay of the parent of a ten-year-old, who wrote an angry letter to the store. As Weinstein explained in an interview, “A book that blurs the lines for adults and kids is a really hard thing for people to figure out how to market” (“Interview with Emily Brobow” 51). Miss Lasko-Gross discussed a similar problem in a recent interview, describing the “touchy” situation of being asked by parents “what they think is right for their children” (“‘A Portrait of the World’” 182). “I think it’s more about context than about words or images,” she added, lamenting that parents often “take things out of context and then get outraged.” Given such widespread and stubbornly persistent beliefs about the kinds of stories that comics are, or are not, capable of telling, and the attendant issues that emerge from such beliefs, the creation of a comic that, intentionally or not, toys with what is suitable for certain audiences can be a means of challenging normative notions of authorial intent and audience expectation. By experimenting with genre conventions, and particularly intended readerships, a text that “blurs the lines” can expose the very assumptions that shape the way people read and respond to art and literature, potentially undermining those very assumptions.

The autobiographical comics of Miss Lasko-Gross and Lauren Weinstein both complicate the possibility of categorizing their works as intended for a particular age demographic. Lauren Weinstein’s Girl Stories takes place during a young woman’s adolescence, specifically from age thirteen to fourteen or fifteen. Miss Lasko-Gross’s Escape from “Special,” also published in 2006, begins in childhood, with a recounting of the narrator’s “earliest memory,” while her second memoir, A Mess of Everything, published in 2009, concludes when the narrator finishes high school. Unlike the works of Aline Kominsky Crumb and Vanessa Davis, the voice of a present-day adult narrator does not drive these memoirs. Instead, the child’s or adolescent’s voice and physical presence dominates these books, as though they were composed by their author’s young personae as the events unfolded or shortly after. The covers of the memoirs establish this conceit early on. Whereas the figures drawn on the covers of Need More Love and Make Me a Woman portray narrators close in age to the authors publishing the works, the fluorescent cover of Girl Stories pictures the face and torso of a cartoonish adolescent giving the thumbs up, a wide, toothy smile splayed across her face, and the more somber, gently colored cover of Escape from “Special” depicts a young woman morosely drawing in her notebook, several strands of bangs loosely covering one eye as she sits at her desk in a classroom (figures 3.1 and 3.2).

Given our general contemporary understanding of adolescence as a moment of transition, the focus on childhood and especially adolescence as the “present” in these memoirs establishes the liminal as a useful and unique vantage point from which to understand and represent the self. As Mary Pipher writes in her seminal book on girls and adolescence, Reviving Ophelia, first published in 1994, “Something dramatic occurs to girls in their early adolescence. Just as ships and planes disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle” (4). The middle and high school years present a time when reflections about self and identity—questions of “who am I?” and “what am I?”—predominate and when categorizations of self, such as gendered, religious, ethnic, sexual, material, bodily, and even cultural affiliations, potentially assume an overwhelmingly devastating or comforting force, depending on how and in what context they are introduced. In this way the transitional frame of adolescence, which I am defining here generally as the time span between childhood and adulthood, is emphasized in these books as a privileged state of knowing, experiencing, and even recalling certain defining moments in the story of one’s life.⁴

By foregrounding questions of identity and classification in graphic renditions of childhood and adolescence as the present, the two works examined in this chapter underscore the aesthetic and narrative possibilities inherent in periods of transition. Yet, despite their emphases on social constructions and categorizations as the dominant lenses that adolescents in particular use to read each other and to be read by one another, unlike the graphic memoirs of Kominsky Crumb and Davis, Escape from “Special” and Girl Stories are texts that do not often refer explicitly to the Jewishness of their main characters. Although questions of Jewish identity are integral to these memoirs of adolescence, the theme of Jewishness emerges more often through absences or asides about ethnic and religious identity and experience rather than through direct, comprehensive engagements. While Jewish themes, symbols, and references can be found in these graphic memoirs, Jewishness is slantingly established and explored, often in relation to more general metaphors of feeling like an outsider or being singled out. As a label that is sometimes attributed to the personae of these memoirs by others and sometimes self-proclaimed, being “special,” a “freak,” or “other” comes to stand, in some instances, as a source of strength and power. At other instances it gets inscribed as an identity label that leads to self-doubt, agony, and the shattering feeling of a sense of rootlessness. Jewishness, as it is often indirectly signified in relation to these nonspecific representations of standing out, is thus open to imaginative revision. But it also runs the risk of effacement or displacement in light of more universally applicable—and therefore, in some ways, “safer”—metaphors for identity and belonging/not belonging.

Escape from “Special,” Miss Lasko-Gross’s debut graphic memoir, is followed by a second memoir, A Mess of Everything, which continues the story chronologically.⁵ The initial book, which is the focus of the first half of this chapter, traces the life of the author’s alter ego, Melissa, from her “earliest memory” to the summer before high school, while the second book tells the story of her high school years.⁶ Despite their immediate frameworks, both texts focus on the problem of what it means to represent the self accurately on the page when that self is located in the lost past of childhood and adolescence, in subjective, unverifiable memories. Each work, originally published in a soft-cover volume of about 6 inches across and 9 inches high, is composed not of a single, cohesive narrative, but instead of separate story fragments, some as short as one page and one as long as fifteen pages. I am limiting my focus here to the first memoir, as it is more invested in the issues of categorization and identity examined throughout this book. In any case the global structures of both works, fragmentary and not committed to an easily decipherable overarching plotline, fall into a similar hybrid grouping as the graphic memoirs of Vanessa Davis, Aline Kominsky Crumb, and Lauren Weinstein. For all these cartoonists, the memoir text is composed of separate vignettes, which do not seamlessly lend themselves to narrative cohesion, collaged together to reflect a fractured sense of self. While most of the comics in Lasko-Gross’s books are divided on the page into clear-cut panels, the breaks between individual stories, often marked by full splash pages, offer the reader a space to imagine and reimagine the links and gaps between different parts of the text or to assert her own imaginative authority. The reader’s reception of separate stories across the pages of a single, longer work thus can be seen as somewhat analogous to what Scott McCloud, in speaking of reading over the gutter of individual panels on the same page, refers to as “closure” (63); in both cases the reader must actively piece together disjointed segments in order to imagine a more cohesive whole.

Though the plotline of Escape from “Special” somewhat improvisationally shuttles Melissa through various scenes and settings, what ties together the narrative slivers contained within is a consistently flat but intense drawing style reinforced by a thick and often heavy black line and expressive, handmade lettering. Drawn and shaded in densely colored blacks, whites, and grays, with starkly depicted figures on the page frequently accompanied by detailed and patterned backgrounds and shapes, the book juxtaposes resonances of the real and unreal, intimacy and distance, and, ultimately, past and present. In these and other ways, the memoir complexly conveys the uneasy relationship between images and memory.

What the reader witnesses on the page of an autobiographical work is always, of course, a mediated or translated version of that memory. In her 2011 study of narratives of childhood, The Promise of Memory, Lorna Martens issues a helpful analogy to describe that distance between memory and text: “Between the recollection and the product of the text there is a gap, similar to that between a dream and the account of the dream” (11). The various formal and stylistic elements that make up Lasko-Gross’s memoir—in addition to the ones already mentioned, these include the simplistically exaggerated features of characters’ bodies and expressions, framed in uneven, clearly hand-drawn panels—serve as constant, patent reminders of that gap, the subjectivity behind the text. The book exposes other gaps as well, and especially distinctions between the outward events, places, interactions, and objects that document Melissa’s youth and her internal world, including the contours of her emotional experiences. If, as Martens writes, “the accuracy of a personal memory often counts far less than its emotional importance” (12), then this memoir is a testament to how affects can be strikingly and uniquely captured on the page through visual-verbal interactions and designs.

The very first story, entitled “Taxoplasmosis: My Earliest Memory,” in its opening panel pictures the persona, Melissa, standing beside her mother’s bed, grasping a Bert doll, one of the two featured Muppets characters from Sesame Street (1, figure 3.3). Melissa is drawn from an angle that disproportionately emphasizes her smallness in relation to her mother’s more domineering figure, which is splayed in bed with closed eyes, puffy and swollen eyelids, and a rash covering part of her face. The child’s thought bubble, drawn in the shape of a puff of smoke and positioned to the side of the page, reads, “Mom?” while her mother, head turned away, is unaware of the daughter watching her. Melissa’s arms clutch her doll as she gazes at this semiconscious figure, whose only sign of life is a groan that emerges in white block letters on the next panel. Her inquiring look, in the opening panel, is reflected by the doll, who also stares with wide eyes at the unconscious mother—though the doll’s “gaze” can be read as vaguely confident (if not glassy-eyed) rather than anxious. The distinction between Melissa’s and her doll’s outward appearances, emphasized by the shared angling of their faces, prefigures the disparity she experiences between her inner and outer worlds throughout the text, a discrepancy that intensifies as she encounters the world outside her home. While her doll represents what will become her public, somewhat nonplussed and frequently resigned visual, and verbal, exterior in times of stress or crisis, her own expressive, frowning visage more closely matches the distressed and uneasy affect suggested by the style of the comic as a whole; it is a mood that matches the sense of uneasiness and displacement she often feels later in the text, though she then tries hard to suppress it.

The inclusion of the depiction of this childhood object in a comic representing her “earliest memory” prefigures a common theme throughout the first half of Lasko-Gross’s memoir (as well as Weinstein’s memoir, Girl Stories), which is the importance of objects in the recollection of early life. In her book’s introduction, Martens notes the significance of “the habitation of space (having one’s places)” as well as the “possession of things” in the act of self-definition. As she writes, “They grant the comfort of a self-extension” (44).⁷ As an extension of her self, the doll represents the parts of the persona’s inner life that are not captured in the drawing of her own face and body; it suggests the more restrained, hidden, or forgotten side of Melissa’s internal reflections, memories, and emotions. The inclusion of the doll in this first panel thus broadens the spectrum of Melissa’s inner life, and especially its contradictions, as it is reflected on the page. Between her own visage and the doll’s, the drawing conveys everything from Melissa’s feelings of intense longing, uncertainty, and worry to her impassiveness, reserve, and even confidence. The childhood object, which appears in various forms, particularly throughout earlier parts of the memoir, serves as an additional vehicle for self-expression and reflection.

As another example, in a short comic pictured later in the memoir, titled “Meet the Band,” Melissa receives a teddy bear from one of her mother’s bandmates just before she is told that she will be joining them on their tour for the summer. In the final two oversized panels of the comic, which each take up half the page, a content Melissa sits in her bedroom at home, an intimate setting enclosed in a dark black background. She has come to replace her old bear with a new one, a gesture that marks an impending transition. In the final panel, her hand cast in front of her in a dominant, instructive gesture, she replaces her old bear with the one just given to her, telling it, “Don’t be offended, I still love and honor you very much!” (41). In this comic, too, the dolls’ faces portray human expressions that change, however subtly, over the course of the narrative. While the young Melissa looks generally cheerful and at ease, the teddy bear pictured beside her in most of the panels often wears vaguely anxious and frightened expressions, as does the old, replaced bear at the very end of the narrative. Childhood objects, such as the teddy bear or Bert doll, therefore increase the surface area, so to speak, of the alter ego’s inner life as it appears on the comics page. Particularly throughout her early childhood, contrasting with the affect drawn into Melissa’s body and face, inanimate objects convey a kind of affective self-exile that persists throughout the memoir and intensifies once she has left behind the comforts of the familiar. As Alison Bechdel writes of her teddy bear Mr. Beezum in the 2012 graphic memoir exploring her own childhood, Are You My Mother?: “He’s not me, but he’s not not-me, either” (115). Bechdel’s second graphic memoir is similarly engaged in the question of the emergence of subjectivity, especially in relation to the family and, in particular, the mother. In one panel in her book, describing the comfort she found, as an adult, in sleeping with her “old Teddy Bear,” and the subsequent embarrassment she experiences as an adult author sharing this detail, she writes: “But Mr. Beezum is not some mass-produced, button-eyed toy. His finely crafted gaze expresses a sublime and infinite compassion. It always calms me to look at him.” Bechdel’s persona’s engagement with the doll as an object of affective transference parallels Melissa’s interaction with her toys in these early scenes. In each case treasured, and sometimes no longer treasured, objects summon a tangible connection to the past even as they evoke the many disparate versions of that past existing in the mind of the memoirist.

In addition to calling attention to the past as a mediated translation, the first panel of the book additionally raises the problem of negotiating the central figure in the narrative of one’s own life. As with Aline Kominsky Crumb’s “Goldie,” the history of Melissa’s self begins with a documentation of the relationship between that self and others, and particularly with maternal figures. In this rendering of her earliest memory, her mother is featured as the central character, the person who, in addition to her doll, though even more fundamentally, serves as a proxy for her sense of self. Her horror here is based on seeing her mother lie dormant and silent; her corpselike appearance disorients Melissa from the outset of her remembered life, as she can only as yet define herself in relation to her mother. Notably, this comic, as with Aline Kominsky Crumb’s mother-monster images, as well as “Goldie,” narrowly envisions the mother from the point of view of the daughter and hence serves to essentially erase the mother’s perspective.⁸ Such a perceptibly limited point of view, highlighted here by the mother’s unconscious state, reinforces the memoir as a series of partial fragments culled from a landscape encompassing many other often unseen potential perspectives and relational configurations; the visible and invisible scripts emerging from the past are continually and dynamically tied to one another, regardless of whether they are finally omitted or visualized on the page.

By exposing Melissa’s early fear of alienation and isolation, this image thus serves as a forerunner to the relational question of identity explored throughout the book, a question that inevitably shifts outside of, or beyond, the family. In this scene Melissa’s mother is depicted as almost a monster—a strange, sickly, and ghostlike presence whose resemblance to the real thing (“Mom?”) increases the horror and anxiety captured in this visual. Even, or perhaps especially, this most “natural” of affiliations is also a site of potential distortion and surprise, a space where belonging, though it should feel most certain, is contradictorily most easily unmoored.

The story comic that follows this earliest memory in the book, another related to the persona’s relationship with her mother, similarly foretells Melissa’s unremitting search for identity and reveals it to be a journey with no clear starting point, even as it maintains its urgency in the memoir’s “present.” This comic, titled “Kidnapped,” which takes up five full pages of the text, could arguably be viewed as part of the “Taxoplasmosis” comic, since there are no clear or definite beginnings and endings to each of the separate stories that make up the book. The easiest way to differentiate between “chapters” is in locating their titles, which are almost all drawn in noticeably diverse lettering—some in cursive, some in block letters, some accompanied by images, some bleeding out or drawn onto a separate panel, and some occupying a good deal of space on the page. In contrast, the remainder of the overall architectures, tones, and styles of the individual stories do not fluctuate considerably. The various, somewhat isolate lettering techniques heading each chapter can consequently be read as a reflection of the persona’s desire to define herself by guardedly experimenting with different identities, a driving force behind many of the stories in the text as a whole. Moreover, this inconsistent lettering, which creates an uneasy indication of where one story ends and another begins, adds to the dreamlike quality of many of these chapters, which are based on memories that coalesce to form one long, phantasmagorical memory-text.

The title of what is arguably, then, the second story within the book is presented in a splash panel, a crowded and oversized image, which in this case takes up the entire page (2, figure 3.4). The letters composing the word Kidnapped are drawn in what looks like a collage of different cutouts, a design meant to mock the style of a ransom note. Mirroring this loosely splayed lettering on the bottom of the image, the upper portion features four female faces, a detail that foreshadows the importance female relationships will play in both of Lasko-Gross’s memoirs. An oversized drawing of the persona’s face, her eyes shut and a large set of “zzzz”s emerging from her head, is depicted at the top left corner. Below the sleeping figure is an image of Melissa’s mother, Jacqui, who is recognizable from the opening panel, although in this depiction, while her eyes are still shut, her face does not have a rash and her torso is naked. With unnaturally long, sinewy arms, the mother grasps at yet another depiction of the persona, this time pictured with a look of terror on her face as she stretches her arms out toward an unknown figure off to the right of the page. Only the ends of the hands of this unknown figure are visible, and they seem to almost but not quite reach Melissa’s hands. Finally, beside the mother stands another, older woman, her eyes shut as well, and her abnormally long arms and hands also reach for the persona’s body.

As the next three pages of the comic unfold, in a pulsing series of smaller, similarly styled panels, five or six to a page, Melissa wakes in her bed, screaming from the dream (“Mom!”), and asks her mother, soon seated beside her, point-blank: “Jacqui, are you my real mother?” (3). Her mother comforts her with reassurances (“Well, I was there at your birth” and “Of course I am. You just had a nightmare”), but Melissa cannot believe what she does not remember, and she cannot understand why she cannot remember her birth (3–4). Throughout these panels the mother’s face is almost always fully or partially hidden, as she is drawn looking in the opposite direction from Melissa, with closed eyes, or as a shadowy figure in the background. The story, which visualizes the horror of dreams when they cannot be differentiated from waking life, conveys a tension made comparable to the horror of not being able to differentiate between self and other, as between “reality,” or “truth,” and memory. If she cannot remember something, could it have really occurred? What happens when her mother’s memories do not match her own? The full-paged opening panel of the comic, which includes two versions of the persona’s face—the sleeping Melissa, with her eyes closed, and the running, moving Melissa, with her eyes open—reflects this fragile border between full consciousness and the dream state or, analogously, between real life and memory. By depicting these two disparate but always connected versions of herself, Melissa offers the possibility of various self-representations, and therefore perspectives, coexisting at the same moment in time. The fear of having been “kidnapped” points to this concern with maintaining a unified sense of self and ties it to the problem of communal belonging. Here Melissa is among a group of women stretching their hands toward her, prompting her to associate with them, to join them. She runs away from them, from this forced affiliation, but it is unclear to whom she is running, a pair of hands with no face or body attached. There is a sense of both horror and excitement, or possibility, at the prospect of being snatched away, of not belonging and of not having any determined outside presences with which to orient the self.

As the comic progresses, Melissa’s mother leaves her alone in bed, musing about her consciousness and memory. Throughout the book, scenes that take place with Melissa alone in the privacy of her bedroom or in bed often result in moments of intense introspection. They contrast with the isolation she experiences when she is among other people, especially in groups, and suggest, as in Vanessa Davis’s comics, that certain kinds of solitariness allow for carefree, imaginative freedom while others result in anxiety and despair. In this scene, once Melissa’s mother has left the room, Melissa is pictured alone in her bed, from different angles. These diverse points of view, collected on the page, project an increased sense of urgency and emotional intensity, as a series of thoughts and questions about subjectivity and memory culminate with the sentence “I always want to know everything true” (5, figure 3.5). The panel depicting this thought pictures a close-up of Melissa’s eye, with two drops pouring down her face. One of the drops is obviously a tear, as it clearly emerges from the bottom of her eyelid. The other ambiguously located drop can be read as a tear, representing sadness, or as a drop of sweat, representing exhaustion or anxiety. The image presents the verbalized desire to remember, to “know everything true,” as an aspiration closely entwined with the visual representation of various affects: to remember is a subjective act affiliated most strikingly with images, which in turn are filtered and shaped by emotions. In addition, the “I” wanting to remember “everything true” is represented by the drawing of a single eye, thereby reinforcing how memory is also always fashioned through an individual consciousness, the eye reflecting the “I.” The panel can consequently be read as a testament to this impossible wish of the autobiographical artist to “know everything true.” At the same time, the image captures the importance of the internal world—of consciousness, subjectivity, and especially emotions—as the keys to external representations of self, to what eventually gets inscribed on the page. While Melissa cannot remember everything “true,” at the very least she can capture the remembered affects related to certain experiences and bring these to life on the page. The very subjectivity that motivates her search for “home,” for a so-called true or objective representation of her individual self and memory, is also, therefore, paradoxically, what prohibits its completion.

Taken together, these two opening story-comics, “Toxoplasmosis” and “Kidnapped,” align Melissa’s desire to record the “truth” with her continued concern for belonging and/or not belonging. Such questions regarding the relationship between identity and subjectivity are interwoven throughout the memoir, tentative inquiries that remain unresolved even as they inform and provoke one another. As Melissa moves through her narrative of childhood and toward adolescence, general ontological inquiries—who am I? where did I come from?—fold into more specific questions of identity, especially in relation to other children in her peer group. She finds herself confronting not only what it means to have been born into a particular perspective but also the significance of acknowledging the manifold filiations and affiliations that continually shape and transform this perspective as its vista extends.

In her book on adolescent literature, Disturbing the Universe, Roberta Seelinger Trites differentiates between childhood and adolescent literature by explaining that the former genre generally deals with conflicts in the protagonist’s immediate environment, whereas the latter focuses on tensions between the individual and the social forces and institutions, including but not limited to the family, she encounters in her daily life.⁹ As she states, “The chief characteristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children’s literature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative” (2). Trites sees the conclusions of works of children’s literature to be generally comforting in that these books “often affirm[] the child’s sense of Self and her or his personal power” (3). In contrast, adolescent literature is concerned with the ways in which adolescents “learn their place in the power structure…[and] learn to negotiate the many institutions that shape them” (x). Lasko-Gross’s graphic memoir, which traverses memories from her early childhood through adolescence, generally confirms this trajectory. In the early childhood scenes depicted at the beginning of the book, despite her consistently anxious posture in relation to her place in the world, she ultimately displays a strong sense of confidence in her determined and emphatic inquiries and observations. Once Melissa enters school and encounters her peers, her sense of alienation, while correlated with depictions of this younger self, is manifestly amplified, and her confidence, or sense of personal power, seems to proportionately diminish. The transition from childhood to adolescence, as tracked in Escape from “Special,” thus reveals how Melissa’s struggles and negotiations with “social power,” as a young adult, are intricately tied to her senses of belonging/not belonging, which extend as far back as her conscious memory and her initial emergence as a subject. But, once Melissa is among her peers, what becomes newly visible is a reactive need for restraint from the ideas, thoughts, feelings, and insecurities that once shaped her remembered experiences. This increased preoccupation with control, and particularly with the suppression of traces of her inner world, emerges as she becomes more aware of her sense of self as relational.

Various comics throughout the first half of the book trace Melissa’s introduction into new schools or other settings involving young adults and teachers; she is generally cast as an outsider almost right away, not only in her own mind but also in the ways that others treat and react to her (at least through her eyes). Her difference is often linked to how she thinks, looks, and behaves around both her peers and adults, and particularly her once authoritative insistence in questioning what is generally taken for granted or recognized as the status quo. This kind of questioning is no longer empowering or without consequence. Instead, it divides her from others. Situated early in the memoir, after several narratives picturing Melissa alone or solely in relation to her mother, the comic “The First Mindfuck,” for example, features her sitting in art class with her classmates, who are all drawing pictures (12). Although this comic clearly takes place while Melissa is still a child—definitions of the time frames of childhood and adolescence vary considerably, but in this case she has clearly not even begun to enter puberty—I read it as an “adolescent” experience because of its focus on the ways that Melissa interacts outside the home, especially among those not in her immediate family.

In the opening, full-page image, she sits sandwiched between two classmates whose eyes are both closed, casting a confused, sidelong glance at one of them as her hands grope carelessly at the picture in front of her. From its outset, Melissa’s time at school, ironically even in an art class, is marked by her sense of difference from those around her. On the following page her increased isolation is recorded in a series of smaller panels, six to the page, that feature her in a range of confused, shocked, and resentful postures. In the first, standing in front of the class, the teacher, colored in white and facing the reader, tells the group, “Ooooh, you’re all doing great pictures!!” (13). Melissa is differentiated from those around her yet again, her body and hair shaded in solid black and her hand raised in isolation. “But they’re all different so they can’t all be great,” she counteracts, and her speech dilates across the page in lettering that contrasts with the teacher’s airier, loosely drawn words. In the following panels she is pictured as progressively set apart from the rest of the group and, unlike her initial, bold proclamation, over the course of the remainder of the page the only word she utters is Really? in response to her teacher’s assertion that “no two people see things the same way.” In the page’s final panel she sits at a table, again set apart from the rest of the group, her hands propping her head up in a gloomy gesture. This resigned posture is mirrored two pages later, in the concluding panel of the comic, after an intense series of meditations that capture her increasing sense of difference from others, whose content, often easygoing semblances dramatically differ from her anxious and gloomy self (15, figure 3.6).

This closing image encapsulates the sense of seclusion and difference Melissa experiences throughout the rest of the story, as in many parts of the memoir, and it also reflects a resignation that contrasts with the determination of her earlier, questioning childhood self. Here she is pictured alone, and the words that appear in thick black capital letters above her head read, I don’t know anything for sure. As with the “eye” panel from “Kidnapped,” her reflections belong to an unacknowledged narrator, and they are represented not in a speech or thought bubble, but instead in a more ambiguous text box accompanying the image. The aimlessness of the heavy words pictured over her head visually reinforces the feelings of isolation and confusion she experiences after this, one of a series of moments of internal crisis recorded throughout the memoir. But her bearing in this case—head leaning on the table, hand cradling her head in an attempt to partially cover her face—differs from her earlier, more expressive and demanding stances. Even the wavy line surrounding this narrative text reflects a softer, more submissive thought process relative to the dramatic zigzagged creases surrounding Melissa’s thoughts in bed. Despite its powerfully morose tone, then, in this image of Melissa at her desk her posture conveys a sense of restraint and a desire for concealment, as though being cast into the world of her peers also means leaving behind the very expressivity, the visible sweat and tears, that once helped affirm her sense of self and connected her internal and external worlds.

In the end, despite Melissa’s frequent, sometimes frantic, and generally unsuccessful attempts to fit in, it is as a distanced, questioning observer—an identity encapsulated in being an artist—that she finally finds her place of belonging, a place that is paradoxically marked by her distance from others. At various points in the book she takes great pride in not being associated with others, in being set apart or “special.” Significantly, these moments often coincide with, or relate to, occasions in which she references her Jewish identity. For example, the comic directly following “How It Seems” recounts Melissa’s entry into Hebrew school, as the title, “Of Little Faith: Jew School,” attests. “Hebrew school”—or “Jew school,” as the narrator satirically references it—is the Jewish equivalent of “Sunday school.” Generally taking place on Sundays or weeknights, this schooling, a supplement to secular education, focuses on Jewish history and culture and often involves the uses of religious texts and/or Hebrew language learning. In this two-page comic, as the teacher sits at the front of the classroom, Melissa’s thought bubbles, large and bright, reflect her impatience with what she views as the enforced morality of the lecture. “How DARE they tell us how to live” (80), she thinks to herself while drops of sweat emerge from her head. Her visible affect here is strong, as she clenches both hands in front of her, but it goes unnoticed by other members of the class, whose division from her is emphasized not only in their bowed and engrossed postures but also in the gray coloring of their faces, which contrast with her bright white one.

In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe the basic paradox of identity and affiliation: “identity as difference implies also identity as likeness” (38). As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, and others have shown, to identify is always to partially disidentify or counteridentify.¹⁰ In order to rebel, even internally, against her religious school teacher—and, consequently, to actively separate herself from others in the class—Melissa has to yield, if unconsciously, to the ties that bind: the Jewish thread that has led them all to “Jew school.” This paradox is made even clearer in “Of Little Faith II,” a related comic located almost forty pages later, in which Melissa is once again pictured in Hebrew school. The title of this sequel is drawn in a lettering style similar to that of the original, with the main difference being that in this case Melissa’s incensed visage is drawn alongside the title lettering, marking her active dis-affiliation from the start (115, figure 3.7). Only a small part of her face is pictured: a quarter of it, including a single eye framed by a furrowed, devilish brow, an ear, and several chunks of hair. This portrayal of her face reveals two small Jewish stars drawn onto it, and instead of a pupil the center of her eye features a third Jewish star. The thought bubble over her head plainly reads, “Get me out of here.” The remainder of this opening page of the comic then depicts Melissa conspiring with a friend in class who agrees with the absurdity of a lecture that literalizes the story of Noah and the flood. Her friend, who is notably also a young girl with long, dark hair, asserts, “As if the whole world could flood!” as Melissa looks on, happily agreeing and thinking to herself, “I’m not the only one.” In a series of three panels following, however, each picturing Melissa at the center of the image with her friend no longer in the picture but for her word bubbles, Melissa is brought back into isolation as the friend asserts, from off the page, “But of course I believe in God!” In the third and final panel, which is also the last one on the page as a whole, Melissa is pictured in profile, morosely sitting at her desk with eyes closed and thinking, “I really am ALONE.” In this portrayal she is drawn as if she were by herself, even though, as earlier panels reveal, she is seated beside a friend in the classroom. Her eyes are shut and her head hangs down heavily. An oval-shaped spotlight falls over her figure, as though to feature her isolation and sense of being cast out of a space where it seemed like she would finally fit in, if only because her internal rebellion had been externally acknowledged by a fellow student.

This sequel to “Of Little Faith” reflects Melissa’s continued inability to fit in, even when it is by questioning the status quo that she attempts to assert her likeness to others. But the stars pictured on Melissa’s face at the beginning of the comic also symbolize an active resistance folded into this otherwise distressing and isolating experience. The opening depiction, and particularly the mark of the Jewish star, clearly designates Melissa’s connection to others in the classroom, which in turn underlines the exertion of her internal rebellion. This visualized negotiation, between a mark of descent and a posture of consent, illustrates an active and relatively confident engagement with her surroundings. As Miss Lasko-Gross explained in an interview, accounting for her inclusion in the memoir of these religious-based upheavals from her past, “your identity is revealed to you in relation to your struggles with whomever or whatever you’re coming up against” (“‘A Portrait of the World’” 179).¹¹ Melissa’s sense of self is affirmed most powerfully in scenes like this one, in which she is connected to a larger Jewish community; it is an association that prompts her to respond. These moments of dis-affiliation empower her, as she transforms from a passive and resigned outcast to a responsive and resistant one.

While the final image in “Of Little Faith II,” with Melissa sitting isolated at her desk, thus seems on first glance to mirror the resignation she frequently feels among her peers, as in her early art school experience, a reading of the illustration in the context of the page as a whole casts the depiction as a moment, instead, of defiance. The spotlight surrounding Melissa in this panel additionally inflects the image with a sense of mediation, of the narrative “I” recalling this past moment from her singular perspective. What the reader witnesses here is not simply a testament to Melissa’s early sense of isolation and difference; instead the portrayal potentially functions as a kind of portal to that incident, a space where its emotional impact can be opened up, prodded, and reoriented in relation to other occasions and reflections from the past.

The oval spotlight in this image, for example, visually connects it with an earlier, imposing, and memorable representation, a self-portrait of Melissa likewise sitting alone at a desk. The full-page illustration is the title panel of a comic, “(Special),” which traces Melissa’s experiences in secular school when she is placed into a “special education” classroom, a move that once again distinguishes her from those around her. In the depiction, which is set against a black background, Melissa is pictured at the center of the page, sitting at a desk with a pencil in her left hand while her entire figure is engulfed in a large flame (82, figure 3.8). The portrayal of Melissa drawing at a desk is a representation that marks the cover of the book and winds its way through many of the pivotal moments in both Lasko-Gross’s memoirs; it is a visual trope that binds the different themes and experiences traced throughout. The desk typically represents the institutions that confine the protagonist and attempt to normalize her. But the act of drawing, alluded to in this and other images not only by the pencil itself but also by the series of sketches visible in her notebook, conversely represents the possibility of freedom. With a pencil and notebook she can imagine a way out of the stifling pressure to conform that is otherwise so tied to the desk.

This self-portrait thus reflects not only the pain of Melissa’s separation and estrangement, from others as well as from various versions of her self, but also the power and drive to repair this separation through a provocative and solitary engagement with art, however anxiety-driven that engagement (as the tapping of her pencil reflects). The underlying subject of Escape from “Special,” as of all the other texts explored in this book, is how self-representations can help revise or reconfigure feelings of being an outsider, which are often initially alluded to in childhood and reinforced or confirmed in adolescence. The personae explored in these diverse texts all actively claim their senses of not belonging by drawing their displacements. Each panel or page becomes a space in which to experience, simultaneously, home and not home. This aesthetic possibility is symbolized here by the flame surrounding Melissa’s body. Her identity as an artist has the potential to free her. But what becomes apparent from this image too is that that identity also has the potential to engulf the more particular categories of difference through which she defines herself. Like her inexplicable, often unidentifiable differences from others, an otherness she has trouble verbalizing and consequently understanding or coming to terms with, her Jewishness is not directly visible here. Setting out to live, like Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Goldie, “in [her] own style”—to define herself through an independent, self-fashioned temperament—also always means running the risk of assimilation, of dissolving other particular categories of difference. But ultimately, as the memoir as a whole reflects, the strength and promise Melissa derives from her art is closely allied with, and at least partially established by, her Jewish identity. It is, after all, in those moments of grappling with her Jewish identity that she establishes a secure and forceful sense of self from within the confines of being figured as different. These moments mark Jewishness in particular as an identity that has the potential to transform her from being a person who is objectified, humiliated, and acted upon, as she is in her “regular” school, into one who can see herself as a subject, who actively responds to the ways others make her feel through her own particularized rebellions.

The near disappearance of the question of what it means to identify as Jewish in Miss Lasko-Gross’s second memoir, A Mess of Everything, mirrors Melissa’s general loss of interest in taking on many of the questions about truth and identity that preoccupy her in the first book. This thematic shift is related to Melissa’s aging out of “Jew school”—the religious institution that marks almost all her engagements with her Jewish identity in Escape from “Special.” There are several exceptions to this direct connection between Melissa’s explorations of her Jewishness and her institutional ties, including the occasional trip to temple, that are recorded in the first memoir.¹² These include the comic “Summers in Exotic Atlantic City New Jersey” (49–53) in which she confronts her grandfather’s racism and notes its injustice and hypocrisy, “especially since we get so upset when people hate us ‘cause we’re Jews,” as she tells her parents (52). Another exception is the comic “The Gruswerk’s Sabbath” (62–64), which pictures her attending a Sabbath dinner with her friend’s family and acting out at the table while prayers are being recited. In the final panel, after being scolded by the father, she thinks to herself, “I’m glad my family isn’t Orthodox and has a sense of humor” (64). In all these comics, including the ones about her experiences in “Jew school,” Melissa’s explorations of her Jewish identity are linked to her parents and family more generally. This is arguably a consequence of the basic affinity between religious affiliation and family. As Trites explains in her discussion of religion as it is addressed in adolescent literature, “Adolescent novels that deal with religion as an institution demonstrate how discursive institutions are and how inseparable religion is from adolescents’ affiliation with their parents’ identity politics” (38). In the second memoir, as Melissa moves her attention increasingly away from her parents and more completely toward the world of her peers, and as her activities slowly shift outside her parents’ control and begin to reflect her own chosen affiliations and involvements, her interest in her religious identity begins to fade, though it never completely vanishes.

This turn from an emphasis on categorizations of identity does not occur in Lauren Weinstein’s Girl Stories, a book in which Jewishness is more often than not presented through silences or omissions, rather than direct or indirect engagements. In Weinstein’s graphic memoir, because religious identity is never tied to any particular institution, like school or synagogue, the association between Lauren’s sense of being an outsider and her Jewish identity has to be extrapolated from what is presented in the text.¹³ In this way Girl Stories proves to be a corollary text to Escape from “Special.” Lauren’s tenuous relationship to her Jewish identity, like Melissa’s, holds the potential to empower her in her search for an affirming sense of self, but its often unconfirmed presence also means that her Jewish sense of self is continually at risk of erasure.

Initially published as a series of short comics on gURL.com, a teen website and online community founded in 1996, Lauren Weinstein’s Girl Stories follows her persona, Lauren, as she finishes middle school and enters high school. Like Escape from “Special,” Girl Stories is composed as a series of vignettes. The various short autobiographical comics contained in the collection are differentiated from one another in a clearly marked index at the beginning of the book, and the coloring and style of each story—and particularly their often distinct backgrounds, many published on a set of distinguishing colored paper—also visibly differentiates them. In addition to their arrangement, the shape of the book, which is roughly 9 1/2 inches wide by 6 inches high, was in part guided by the way the comics were first constructed, as they were initially published on the Internet; the panoramic configuration was the easiest way to fit those images onto paper. As Weinstein explained in an interview in response to a question about the disparate sizes of her three published books, and particularly the thumbable Girl Stories, the book “seemed like [it] should be wide and thin and accessible” (“Thinking Panoramically” 185).¹⁴

Despite their parallel emphases on adolescence and identity, Weinstein’s graphic memoir follows a different trajectory than that of Lasko-Gross’s first book. Escape from “Special” opens with a preoccupation with filial ties and moves toward an engagement with affiliative registers, including encounters with friends, classmates, and, later, boyfriends. Girl Stories, on the contrary, which tracks an adolescent Lauren as she moves through eighth grade and into her first year of high school, settles in where Lasko-Gross’s first memoir ends. From its opening, Lauren is already immersed in the world of her peers, although the introduction to the book, presented on two sides of the same page, somewhat misleadingly features school and family as dual focal points in her life. On the first page of this introduction, the narrator displays a panoramic scene from her school hallway, which evokes a carefully constructed chaos (5, figure 3.9). This bottom half of the page pictures a wide rectangular image bursting with brightly drawn, vibrant watercolors, including lime-green lockers bordering the background and animate characters doing everything from shuffling importantly with their coffee mugs (teachers) to chatting in clusters, rolling together on the floor, or passing by in coupled pairs (students). In the space over this bubbly, active illustration, whose contours are irregularly shaped through brushstrokes that bleed onto the surrounding white page, the narrator’s shaky, inked writing is visible. Beginning with the word Hello!, captured in oversized and colored-in bright-red rounded letters, the textual introduction continues with a string of short statements, drawn in all-capital letters and often punctuated with exclamation marks. “And welcome to my life, which is currently like being in jail! I’m in eighth grade, and I’ve been going to the same stupid school with the same stupid fifty people since Kindergarten! That’s nine years!!!!” (5).

Upon turning the page, the reader encounters matching handwriting, a brightly colored “Meanwhile” mirroring the opening “Hello!,” and the narrator continues, “My parents are totally messed up. Like, my dad is addicted to playing ‘The Legend of Zelda,’ and my mom is always working to save the poor (which is really admirable, but she never rests!)” (6). In addition to this placement of the dual introductory image-texts on two sides of the same page, the word meanwhile suggests that the narrator’s family life is a concurrent plotline unraveling alongside her school life. Two separate panels are depicted below this second introductory text, with Lauren featured, however peripherally, in both of them. In each she is pictured standing at home, behind a parent, asking for a favor and receiving an indifferent response. Her repeated presence in these portrayals of her parents contrasts with her absence from the panoramic school hallway drawing, as does the more muted verbal description of her life at home, in which she is relegated to a minor character. Despite their coexistence on the opening pages of the book, then, life at school, as opposed to life at home, is portrayed as bustling, explosive, and still somewhat unpredictable, a world that has yet to be fully explored or comprehended, but one that potentially has a space in it for Lauren. On the contrary, domestic life, exemplified by these mirroring interactions with her parents, who each face away from her as she talks to the backs of their heads, is boring, predictable, and characterized by Lauren’s marginalized status in relation to her parents’ obsessive and isolating preoccupations.

Although family is not emphasized in the bulk of Girl Stories, this prefatory dual framework suggests that the book is interested, like Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman and Miss Lasko-Gross’s Escape from “Special,” in the contrast between so-called private and public lives and identities. The memoir is structured as a private diary, a conceit introduced in the inside cover just prior to the introduction and a hand-drawn “Author’s note” and “Table o’ Contents.” “This is the book of Lauren R. Weinstein,” the page reads in the same bright-red and bubbly handwriting found at the opening of the introduction (figure 3.10). As a diary composed in the “present” of adolescence, the book conveys an emotional urgency, as though Lauren does not know how events will turn out. “If found please don’t read!” the inscription continues, although it concludes, “Okay! Fine! You can read it!” This opening prefigures a tension that winds through the memoir—the contrast between how Lauren presents herself to others in her real life and how she presents herself not only in private but also to the readers of her “private” diary. In other words, even the so-called nonpublic or intimate act of diary keeping becomes a performance, an operation colored by Lauren’s overwhelming adolescent self-consciousness, which makes her feel inclined to share everything she thinks and does as a matter of course.

On the other end of the same page, with its bursting, psychedelic background illuminated in fluorescent coloring, a framed self-portrait of the author introduces the mix of humor, apprehension, and confessional fluency that characterizes the rest of the book, and particularly the way these elements will come together through the expressive drawings and verbal accompaniments of the diarist-narrator. Lauren is drawn here in a posture, coloring, and style relatively restrained in relation to the brighter, more lively, and expressive drawings of this persona throughout the text. She stands at an easel, sketching a still more subdued, even morose, version of herself, devoid of color or texture. Beside the image, which is a self-portrait incorporating another self-portrait in the making, both contained in the space of a single panel, large red arrows animatedly caption the otherwise calm scene, announcing, in separate white bubbles, “That’s me!!!” “Big wrinkly forehead” “Bags under eyes” “Kind of fat.” As this opening depiction suggests, the alter ego presented in the text is one version of many possible alter egos, and it is the framework of the diary, a kind of dialogic self-portrait, that allows Lauren to explore various and simultaneous accounts of self-knowledge and self-perception.

Crucially, and in contrast to Lasko-Gross’s memoir structure, the diary construction of Girl Stories also inflects Weinstein’s persona, Lauren, with a sense of agency, however qualified, from the very outset of the text, an outlook that might otherwise be more difficult to capture in this memoir similarly recording the pains of adolescence. Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist and author of the aforementioned Reviving Ophelia, endorses adolescent girls’ diary keeping for just this reason. As she explains, “Girls this age love to write. Their journals are places where they can be honest and whole. In their writing, they can clarify, conceptualize and evaluate their experiences. Writing their thoughts and feelings strengthens their sense of self. Their journals are a place where their point of view on the universe matters” (255).¹⁵ Because of the diary structure of her memoir, unlike Melissa in Escape from “Special,” Lauren is not a young girl winding in and out of moments of paralysis and resignation in the “present” tense of her past memories, searching for a potentially freeing sense of self and identity. She is instead an observing artist from the outset, even if those observations still emerge from a presumably adolescent mind, and this stance allows her a safe vantage point from which to record her humiliations, anxieties, and occasional triumphs.

This somewhat distanced posturing is evident in the opening pages of the book, after the framing prologue and introduction. In one of the stories, for example, a twelve-page comic titled “The Tub,” Lauren recalls a humiliating incident that takes place in the eighth grade, after an event occurring earlier in the year already established her status as an outsider. The comic is drawn in various drab green tones, with a contrasted bubble gum pink background highlighting strips of verbal narration woven throughout the story. This distinction in coloring underscores the presence of the narrator—a diarist—as an intermediary in this otherwise candid recollection of a humiliating event. Besides the pink, the comic’s narrow range of colors, with its unappealing palate of murky yellows and greens, additionally casts Lauren’s depiction of this experience as closely tied to the very particular impression it left on her, an impression that has made an indelible mark even as she seeks to reimage it on the pages of her diary.

The scene concludes when, having submerged herself in front of the entire class in a “garbage can lined with a big, black garbage bag,” Lauren walks away mortified. In the final image of the story, she is dressed in a swimsuit and surrounded by fully clothed classmates gathered around her in the middle of the “old boys’ locker room,” her hands covering her shivering body. In the background, olive green lockers line the room, recalling the lighter-colored lime green lockers pictured in the school hallway in the book’s introduction and emphasizing how experience has changed Lauren’s impression of the once cheerful and energetic spaces around her, full of possibility. One observing student in a line of students, his hands burrowed in his pockets, calmly declares, “Freak,” as she passes by (45). Lauren’s sense of estrangement is reinforced by the lack of narrative text on this concluding page, a near-silent configuration that fortifies the immediacy of the indignity she has just undergone. There is, at least for the moment, no interpretive voice to soften the force of the event.

But the memoir, as it is structured, does not claim this painful image as a conclusive one. Instead, upon turning the page, the reader is greeted by a panoramic, fantastical epilogue, a one-page comic whose title, “Freak!” directly connects it to the previous story line (46, figure 3.11). A set of ghostly but nonetheless inviting faces lines the top of the page, sketched and shaded in different colors against a bright yellow backdrop that contrasts with the generally gloomy, muted greens of the previous comic as well as of the one that follows. In this image freak is scribbled over and again on the page, in both filled-in red lettering and also sketchy, inked outlines. The word comes to stand for Lauren’s lack of presence in the illustration, as it connects her, even in her absence, to a community of artists and musicians that presumably holds a place in it for her. “Well, I might be a freak, but at least I have my music and ART,” the bright red words on the page read, and they are partly superimposed over the centered drawing of an androgynous-looking character playing a guitar. The figure is likely Morrissey, lead singer of the independent rock group, The Smiths, who is known not only for his biting and melancholy lyrics but also his often contrarian and enigmatic real-life persona. The title page of “Morrissey & Me,” the following comic, which envisions an imaginary series of conversations between Lauren and the singer and is set against an equally morose sequence of drab green backdrops, faces this full-page image and reinforces the sense of connection Lauren experiences with other self-proclaimed outsiders. By depicting this cluster of outcasts, however imaginary the scene, Lauren transforms the experience she has just portrayed: a hostile epithet becomes a proud banner as a victim transforms into a puppet master. The diarist is the narrator of her own life.

This representation, which can ironically be read as a kind of self-portrait, thus serves as Lauren’s intervention into a scene of paralysis. Her focus here—in drawing other people, instead of herself—is on the ways she can manipulate or shape others through her art and writing, even if her ultimate objective is to reimagine herself so she can find a place of comfort and belonging. This approach differentiates her from Miss Lasko-Gross’s protagonist, whose quest to fit in is most often directly tied to a desire to control her own outward self-expressions and whose search for an affirming sense of self, even among her peers, is therefore centered on a desire to negotiate between her inner and outer worlds. Lauren’s search for belonging is instead largely cast as a struggle that begins and ends with how she is perceived and treated by others and how she can fashion their perception of her. This pursuit aligns with the diary structure, which allows her to continually maintain a dialogue with an audience, albeit a presumably imaginary one.

In the following pages of the comic, Lauren similarly reframes these scenes of Barbie play by recording, in careful detail, what Erica Rand describes as “queering Barbie” (12), using the doll and her accessories in ways that are not endorsed by its seller, the Mattel company. Rand uses the term queerness to connote both what she describes as its “narrow sense”—gender—and also its “broader sense”—the “odd, irregular, and idiosyncratic” (11), though she recognizes that the two meanings of the terms are always “entangled.” In this discussion I am particularly invested in the broader sense of the term, as it is Lauren’s primary focus. As she writes on the following page of the comic, above a diagram mapping out her process, “Once a Barbie enters my realm she goes through at least three weeks of reconditioning” (9). She then conveys, through words and pictures, the stages of transformation she puts her dolls through, turning them into unsanctioned and unconventional Barbies, including an “Astrobabe,” a “Punk,” a “Fabulous Vampire Superstar,” a “Cavegirl,” and a “Mom” with blue hair and bags under her eyes (10). Lauren’s “queer” Barbie play foreshadows the many themes that take up the rest of the narrative, but especially the tension between the conventional and the unconventional, between wanting to fit in, even in two worlds that seem diametrically opposed, and taking pleasure in not fitting in, in rebellion. Her manipulation of these dolls also relates to the book’s consistent engagement in the hazards and freedoms of self-fashioning: these games grant Lauren the power to shape the doll’s appearances and, consequently, their identities, but the very involvement in play with such a popular toy excludes her. In a subsequent comic, for example, her Barbie play leads her to self-identify as a “loser” (15), a precursor to her later self-characterization as a “freak.”

In the end, whatever pleasure Lauren derives from confessing to and exposing herself in these intimate scenes, these early comics finally reflect the limitations of her imagined audience. While shaping her own experiences on the page might lead to the pretense of feeling in control, these solitary ventures confirm her isolation and difference, as the final page of the comic reflects. Alone in her room, Lauren laments the absence of her friend, Diana, “The only person who I have ever met that was good at playing Barbies…who was my best friend until about two years ago, when she decided to be cool” (13, figure 3.12). This passage, included just pages before Lauren is finally pictured interacting in the school hall presented in her introduction, sets up the book to be a story about loss, or banishment, from a previous state of belonging, and the subsequent search for companionship, return. But, although the absence of Diana’s character is framed as the source of Lauren’s alienation, as the careful drawing of her bedroom reflects, it is also the empty, private, and once animate space of her room juxtaposed against the adolescent world of her peers—the spacious corridors of middle and high school—that prompts Lauren’s heightened sense of alienation early in the book. This feeling of estrangement persists in the second half of the memoir, even though, in ninth grade, Lauren increasingly, and often uncomfortably, finds herself cast in the role of insider.

Lauren’s physical presence in this image also prefigures her increased preoccupation, throughout the second half of the book, with the (female) body as a site of adolescent anxiety, desire, and humiliation—the target of both longed for, and dreaded, changes. Despite the self-reflexive nature of the memoir, and the conscious attempts that Lauren makes, with line, color, style, form, and even narrative text, to control her own adolescent body, that body repeatedly surfaces as a problem. As Sidonie Smith argues, in memoir writing the body is often a potential site of simultaneous identification and disidentification. She describes it as a starting place for many memoirists, especially in their searches for a singular sense of identity, since “bodies seem to position us as demarcated subjects separate from others and to locate us in bounded temporalities and trajectories of identification. Thus the body seems to be the nearest, most central home we know” (267). However, Smith adds, the very closeness of the body and its unity, “temptingly stable and impermeable,” is nothing more than a facade, disruptive as soon as we take into account its politics, or the differences that need to be stifled in order for us to consider it a reflection of a singular, categorizable, and unitary self. For this reason, along with its potential to “anchor” us, “the body is our most material site of potential homelessness.”

As the following two pages of the comic introducing high school reflect, Lauren’s experience in ninth grade is strongly shaded by her related, increased interest in and awareness of her gender and sexuality. Her requited interest in one particular boy, John, transforms her, on the following page, from another anonymous member of the crowd to an individual. Her impending role as his girlfriend presents her, for the first time outside her fantasy life, with a confirmed insider position. However, like Melissa in Escape from “Special,” that identification also functions as the starting point for an affirming sense of self that is most powerfully established by her rejection of it. By finding herself tied to a specific role, belonging, particularly when, for Lauren, it is initiated in and through the visible body, prompts estrangement, the division of self from self.

Halfway through this short narrative, Lauren is finally distinguished from Diana, as she is pictured increasingly in relation to John or as part of a couple. On the final page of the comic, the two are featured alone in a series of six panels (118, figure 3.13). As the first three snapshots of the scene unfold, the awkwardness between them is punctuated by minimal word bubbles and a panel, the central one, reflecting silence, though there is no indication of how long that silence lasts. The blue hues consistently shading these images confirm the atmosphere of anticipation that accompanies Lauren’s memory of their first kiss, including, crucially, the uncertain and uncomfortable moments leading up to it. Her thought bubbles add humor to the limited bits of conversation recorded between the two, hinting at the layers of unspoken and unpictured subjectivity that never make it to the page. The final three panels record the decisive event in the exchange, though again there is no sense of how long this interaction lasts or whether these final illustrations represent a time span somewhat equivalent to the previous three anticipatory ones. “Wow! We’re kissing,” Lauren thinks to herself in the central bottom panel, which is the second image depicting them kissing, and the words highlight the disparity between the calm, matter-of-fact illustrations of their two figures and the disbelief Lauren experiences internally. “And now we’re Frenching,” the next and final panel reads, the words reinforcing Lauren’s continued need to narrate, especially when she feels out of place in her own body.

In their 2005 review essay, “Writing Back: Rereading Adolescent Girlhoods Through Women’s Memoir,” Elizabeth Marshall and Theresa Rogers argue that many contemporary memoirs written by women about adolescence offer counternarratives to popular culture’s notions about what their experiences are actually like. Reading four works in particular, including Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age graphic memoir Persepolis, they assert that “women’s retrospective constructions of adolescent girlhood provide alternative scripts about gender” (17). Throughout Girl Stories, portrayals of Lauren’s body frequently interfere in scenes that might otherwise be read as part of a predictable adolescent narrative; these intrusions emphasize Lauren’s subjectivity, foregrounding her point of view. By transforming the innocuous and somewhat disembodied representations leading up to the “first kiss” into a disproportionately magnified and unattractive anatomical image, the protruding mouth at the end of “Skate Date” empowers Lauren as storyteller by recording the reality of her otherwise “typical” adolescent experience from the perspective of a resistant female body. The image of the mouth visualizes the abject in what would otherwise be a detached and stereotypical representation.

In another interaction between the couple, recounted three pages later in the comic “John & I Go to the Movies…,” Lauren’s experience of the situation is conveyed, in contrast, in a series of images depicting only her external body as it corresponds with his. But a close reading of this story line similarly confirms the power Lauren’s narrating self can wield from within the space of conformity and belonging, provided she finds a way to distance herself from the scene. At first glance the representations of the two on a date seem to erase Lauren’s individual subjectivity. The first page of the story features a sequence of small panels—eighteen in total—without a single word pictured besides the title, written in bubbled red letters at the top of the page (121, figure 3.14). The small panels look like photos from a photo booth, or individual panels from a filmstrip, a conceit that adds to the sense of performance of the occasion. The series opens from the point of view of a distanced observer, as Lauren and John sit beside each other, and their interaction of being on a first date at the movies recalls, in itself, a spectacle. The panels then zero in on their hands, as they inch together slowly, and these depictions are portrayed from the couple’s vantage point. The point of view then shifts once again, and, as the comic goes on, somewhat repeatedly, picturing fragments of the two of them (arms and legs, mostly) from diverse angles, with Lauren’s individual perspective sometimes interjecting to catch the profile of John’s face. The last image on the page features a final close-up of the two, once again from the viewpoint of an unpictured third person, an imaginary observer, and this time they are holding hands with their heads slightly angled toward one another. This image resembles a drawing of a photograph, as the couple’s eyes seem to be concentrated on an anonymous onlooker. Their stances look artificial, like the entire interaction was staged for the benefit of that observer.

The posed interactions portrayed within these panels draws attention to the couple’s bodily postures as pretense. In this deconstruction of the event, their behaviors are conveyed as affectations based, presumably, on a mirroring of actions and behaviors learned and absorbed from the wider world, including the movie screen. The voyeuristic illustrations of these bodily interactions thus reinforce the performativity of Lauren’s diary project as a whole. Her role as diarist, which compels her to direct and record the unfolding details of her life, complements her place as star of this adolescent plot, as she acts out the prescribed role of a teenager on her first real date. In each of these narrative portrayals of Lauren and John, first in “Skate Date” and later at the movies, whether by disruption or deconstruction, the off-center depictions reflect a consistent awareness of a potentially real or imagined audience. This mindfulness transforms Lauren from one passively undergoing these experiences to one actively shaping them. Each of these scenes therefore demonstrates how Lauren’s capacity to develop a sustaining counternarrative to the experience of adolescence hinges on her ability to create distance between that experience and the telling of it. It is a possibility reflected in earlier parts of the book, particularly in scenes—like the eighth grade hallway or the “freak” self-portrait—where her absence from the image actually conveys her presence as storyteller. Lauren’s capacity for self-definition and self-possession is therefore tied to her identity as an artist and writer, the composer of her own story. Nonetheless, many of her interactions with others, and particularly with her friend Diana, also powerfully expose the limitations of this affirming sense of self, mapping out the ways her self-representations are also always tied to how she sees herself in relation to others. In other words, her self-depictions, relational no matter their particular expressions, mark her body as a potential site of both locatedness and homelessness.

From the final page of the “Barbies” comic to the early interactions between John and Lauren, it is clear that Diana’s absence, and presence, in various scenes throughout Lauren’s adolescent life crucially affects her sense of fitting in. In many ways, throughout Girl Stories, Diana acts as a foil to Lauren, as Lauren often unsuccessfully searches for a space of belonging. A comic located toward the end of the book, and titled “Diana,” exemplifies just how tied Lauren’s self-definition is to her friend. The title panel of this comic is a full page, featuring Diana’s name neatly scripted against a background of green trees with two disparately shaped noses poking through them, each drawn wildly out of scale (170, figure 3.15). The connecting page of the comic then introduces the friends with an image of the two of them standing next to each other. “This is my friend Diana,” the narration reads. An arrow points to Diana’s head, as if to single her out, even though she is the only other person in the illustration besides the narrator. “We are really great friends,” the narration continues. “Look at how beautiful and special she is! And skinny too!” As both the visual and verbal cues on the page indicate, Lauren’s identification with Diana is grounded in their similarities. Both have dark, wavy hair and almond brown eyes. But these similarities also crucially underline their points of difference, and particularly the ways Lauren experiences certain bodily details (hinted at here by Lauren’s mention of Diana’s skinniness) as stubbornly distinguishing the two of them.

The following page breaks down the dual nature of the previous two pages, featuring a close-up of a partially illustrated, single face: two large brown eyes span the page, with colored blue and pink stars framing those eyes and adding a dreaminess to the otherwise innocuous figure (172, figure 3.16). Because the two adolescents “have many things in common,” as Lauren explains of the depiction, the close-up, at first glance, could be of either girl. The illustration itself does not plainly attempt to distinguish between the two, and, in fact, the absence of the nose, so glaringly present in the comic’s opening, compels the reader to imagine that either could be pictured here. The words written below the illustration, however, tell of their differences: “Except her hair is shinier, and she has this awesome widow’s peak, which frames her larger more mysterious eyes. And I have a bigger nose.”

The nose thus sets Lauren apart, but, particularly when read in the context of the memoir as a whole, its exaggerated importance here also symbolizes Lauren’s self-fashioning as a means of empowerment. After all, Lauren’s very feelings of displacement, of being a “freak,” are what often compel her to actively map her life on the pages of her diary. The nose as an embellished sign of difference consequently reflects how shaping her unwieldy body on the page is actually a way of asserting control. A number of female autobiographical cartoonists in particular seem to utilize this very tactic in drawing images of their personae. Consider, for example, how cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner, author of the semiautobiographical coming-of-age graphic narrative The Diary of a Teenage Girl, recently described the ways that autobiographical self-depictions, and specifically how one chooses to distinguish oneself on the page, can be a means of self-affirmation. Rather than presuming self-representations are always literally or directly correlated with the particular anxieties of an autobiographical cartoonist, with how she feels about her body in real life, Gloeckner suggested that such depictions can more powerfully be understood as reflections of the complex process of conscious self-fashioning. As she delineated in a conversation about the question, so often posed to female cartoonists (as we have seen with Aline Kominsky Crumb), of why they frequently draw themselves as ostensibly “uglier” than they are in real life: “Maybe it is not even always a question of ugly or beautiful. It is something else. You don’t want to make your features so reduced to just bumps that it is not you. You just have to find your essence somehow. And it is beyond any kind of judgment” (Gloeckner et al. 103). As Gloeckner suggests here, and as Kominsky Crumb reveals in her self-representations, orienting the self with a single, reductive detail, however drawn out of scale, can be an act of defiance. In the context of a culture in which women’s self-depictions are so often literalized, “leading” with the nose, something Kominsky Crumb admitted to on the same panel, becomes a means of resistance, a refusal to operate within the confines of conventional systems of calibration, of “space and scale.”

Although this protruding nose is never directly revealed to be a Jewish nose in particular, certain moments in the narrative point to that distinct and probable association. For instance, in one of the early Barbie comics, Lauren writes to the makers of Barbie, reporting four of her “frustrations with your product.” One of these includes the fact that “I have never been able to find a pretty brown-haired, brown-eyed Barbie. All your Barbies look like Aryans!” The term Aryan, used often in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a racial term meant to divide Jews, among other marginalized groups, from a supposed blue-eyed, blond-haired “master” race, establishes Lauren’s annoyance here as prompted by her Jewish identity and her stereotypical “Jewish looks.” Not coincidentally, Diana can be characterized by many of these same physical attributes, with her dark hair and eyes, suggesting that Lauren’s repeated need to define herself in relation to this friend stems from a recognition of their joint Jewish heritage.

Like Melissa, then, Lauren’s Jewish identity, signified by the whopping presence and subsequent absence of her nose on three consecutive pages in “Diana,” offers her a space of not belonging that ironically and powerfully fortifies her personal rebellions, her moments of potential imaginative revision. There are several other comics throughout the book that more directly address Lauren’s Jewish identity, including the eleven-page comic titled “The Chanukah Blues.”¹⁶ This story, featured when Lauren is still in the eighth grade, between comics that more directly address her relationship with her peers at school, is telling not only for its content but also for its peculiarly slapstick and fantastical tone and style. Set against a light-pink background, the story opens with Lauren uncharacteristically addressing her Jewish identity directly, as she sits on Santa’s lap and tells him that she doesn’t want anything for Christmas because she is Jewish (64–74). The rest of the narrative reflects her continued sense of alienation in relation to her non-Jewish peers, a feeling that leads her to exaggerate her differences. As she relates, “In Kindergarten I was the one who told all the Christian kids that Santa didn’t exist” (65). In the comic, Lauren is approached by Latke Boy, an oversized potato pancake, who tells her, “I help Jewish boys and girls everywhere get over the Chanukah Blues” (71). On the final page she stands beside an oversized menorah, her parents hugging her while she uncharacteristically smiles and accepts their embraces without a word.

“The Chanukah Blues” is an anomalous piece in relation to the rest of the memoir not only because in it Lauren addresses her Jewish identity directly, as well as relating comfortably to her parents, but also because of the way it is drawn. Each page of the caricatured comic presents a dramatically divergent image of Lauren, including a number of depictions of her younger self, but the emotional resonances of these depictions are difficult to interpret or collectively decipher. Additionally, many of the characters Lauren encounters throughout the plotline are nowhere to be found in the rest of Girl Stories, and the ones that are (like her parents) are almost unrecognizable. Latke Boy’s incongruous nature in relation to the rest of the memoir reinforces Lauren’s inability to grapple with her Jewish identity in any easy or direct manner. Instead, as its farcical tone reveals, such an unquestioned and direct relationship to Jewishness makes Lauren uncomfortable. Jewish identity is a site of potential connection and freedom, but only when established in a peripheral or oblique manner, one that reinforces Lauren as both the protagonist and director of her own story, however illusory those roles.

In a black-and-white cartoon collected in Lauren Weinstein’s first collection, Inside Vineyland, published in 2003, she pictures a large, rectangular panel at the top of the page, which contains a carefully sketched rocky seascape and two ghostly outlines of people, with the words you and other etched inside of these figures (figure 3.17).¹⁷ Below the image, a smaller rectangular box features a sampling of possible people and creatures that may be inserted into the blank space of “your companion.” The list, with accompanying illustrations, reads: “(1) snail; (2) sea lion; (3) Cheryl; (4) proud Indian; (5) Smokey; (6) Mercenary; and (7) Jesus Christ.” Each of these potential “others” is drawn in a shape that does not easily match the long, ghostly silhouette of the “other” figure posed by the sea. Finally, beside the title of the comic, simply written in large capital letters at the top of the page, a tiny sailor, standing with one leg crossed over the other and his hands at his side, is depicted looking off into the distance.

Despite its satiric and cryptic bent, in a single page this comedic “Self Visualization Activity” encompasses many of the features of Weinstein’s and Lasko-Gross’s memoirs. The self is always identified in relation to the other, and both are phantoms whose presences can potentially, though never comfortably, materialize to reflect a bafflingly particular individual presence. In other words, people, in life as well as on the page, are always situated somewhere between complete anonymity and particularity, between stereotype and antistereotype.

By listing certain identity labels in connection with names and figures that do not match in any discernible way, this cartoon questions the ease with which people are labeled and referenced in relation to one another. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in Epistemology of the Closet, “People are different from each other” or “the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species” (22). Both Escape from “Special” and Girl Stories are works that question the ease with which identifications are imagined and framed. It is because Jewishness emerges at key moments in the texts—and all but disappears at other moments—that it maintains its significance as an unstable but potent marker of difference, a potential site of powerful rebellion.