Word: memoirize
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Marjane Satrapi is a typical headstrong girl on the cusp of adolescence: she questions her teachers, her parents and her society. It just happens that society is a misogynistic theocracy. Persepolis (Pantheon; 153 pages) is Satrapi's memoir of growing up in a well-off progressive family in the wake of Iran's Islamic revolution. Marjane's mother tapes their windows (to guard against bombs) and covers them in black curtains (to guard against their devout neighbors' prying). Drawn in simple, bold lines with wide, inquisitive eyes, Marjane is precocious and passionate, and her small rebellions (sneaking a cigarette) mirror...
...touchstone was Vitebsk, the Russian village where he was born in 1887. His parents were Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, descended from a culture suspicious of imagery but possessing a long tradition of mysticism and of the spiritual ecstasy that courses through his art. In My Life, the lovely but unreliable memoir that he wrote when he was just 35, Chagall recalls how his family used painted canvases to protect the wooden floors of their house. "My sisters," he observes dryly, "thought pictures were made expressly for that purpose...
...Over and over one half withers and dies. Other non-Quimby strips from the same period appear in the book and contain straight autobiography juxtaposed to comicbook tropes. One remarkable piece appears to be a superhero story, but all the words, including the onomatopoeia, read together as a short memoir of the author's childhood. But none of it gets lugubrious, since Ware remains at bottom a humor cartoonist. Painfully funny, his sharp wit specializes in an alternative kind of schadenfreude: a kind where we feel we are laughing at our own misery...
KATY LEDERER. Lederer, an American poet well known for her collection Winter Sex, attempts prose in her memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers. The book brings the world of professional gambling to life, offering a perceptive account of growing up as well as gambling. Lederer’s childhood includes an English professor father, a mother hooked on crossword puzzles, solitaire, and scotch and two older siblings who rob their mother’s purse. All gamblers and all fiercely competitive, the family becomes split after the kids go to college and the parents divorce...
...geniuses and the chance to peer into his unpolished doodles should not be missed. Another great find was a little hardcover called "War Time and Play Time" ($15) by Luc Leplae. Born in Belgium in 1930, Leplae only started doing comix in his mid-sixties as a form of memoir. The family originally put them on the web, and now has published some as well. They have a charming, outsider-art kind of simplicity on a subject - growing up in Nazi-occupied Europe - rarely found in comics...