- Fantagraphics Books
About three years ago, when she was 27 and single and awaiting the publication of her second book, the graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, comics artist Lucy Knisley had the opportunity to do some traveling. She spent one September in Europe, speaking at a comics conference, visiting friends, and having a sweet but doomed relationship with a Swedish man who lived on a commune. Six months later, she accompanied her grandparents on a Caribbean cruise as their caretaker. On both trips, as she does whenever she travels, Knisley kept a detailed travel journal in pictures.
“Not to be a main character in your own story seems like a metaphor for that stage of development,” Knisley observes. “I found it sad.”
Knisley’s glad, though, that she’s been able to chronicle that phase of her life, which has since ended. The book she’s currently working on, Something New, is about how, in the span of two years, she went from being a single New Yorker to a married Chicago homeowner. Like Relish, it’s a formal book, paneled out and scripted. The final draft is due in a month in a half.
