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Children
play. As cartoonist Lynda Barry notes in What It Is,
play and fun are not necessarily the same thing. Play can
be very serious and involve being brave and saving the village.
The fairy tale adaptations used in play can equip children
to deal better with the ambiguities and difficulties that
crop up in their real worlds. And children are often saving
their villages from monsters that are startlingly similar
to the monsters in their real lives.
As a
child, Barry was obsessed with the Gorgon, who she realizes
now was very much like her mother. Barry notes, "We never
need certain monsters more than when we were children. […]
What was yours?" At some point, children stop playing and
stop believing in monsters. By posing the question, Barry
wants her readers examine their childhoods and start playing
again.
Lynda
Barry's lengthy artistic credentials include the long-running
weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, frequent appearances
on The David Letterman Show in the 1980s and '90s,
and the well-reviewed graphic novels The Good Times Are
Killing Me and Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel. In
What It Is, Barry turns away from her usual funny and
weird humor and instead relates a tender and heartbreaking
story about the elusive nature of creativity—finding
it, losing it—along with instructions for finding it
again.
What
It Is, with lush color illustrations on every page, is
part memoir, part analysis of the creative process, and part
children's-style activity book, complete with birds to trace
and places in the book to write. Pages of provocative questions
are illustrated in a stream-of-consciousness style with elaborate
ink and watercolor drawings, text cut from books and found
letters, and 1950s-style children's book drawings. Readers
are encouraged to think about questions such as "How do objects
summon memories?" Some queries, like "Can you picture the
place where your first telephone was?" will likely elicit
a flood of memories. Others are less tangible, and the answers
may prove to be more elusive. Barry, empathizing with the
reader, provides an illustration of two adorable and innocent
deer, captioned in schoolgirl cursive on a torn piece of lined
paper, saying "We are sorry we can't answer."
The memoir
portion of the book, drawn in Barry's child-like and raw style,
tells the story of her childhood, one not dissimilar to many
other American childhoods. Barry grew up in a trailer park
with parents who smoked and drank and cheated on their spouses
and yelled at the kids. She tried to conjure imaginary friends
but couldn't do so until the local supermarket gave away some
fairy tale books, the first books that entered her home. After
that, her life opened up and she began to draw, but she eventually
succumbed to the lure of TV, which allowed her to turn off
her mind. In high school, she went back to drawing but felt
she could only succeed at copying things. It wasn't until
college that Lynda began to play again.
The interplay
of the two sections asks readers to look at their own memories
and maybe equate their lives with Barry's. The emotional impact
is intense and visceral. Barry uses this opportunity, when
the readers are at their most vulnerable, to invite them to
become children again by going through the "Writing the Unthinkable"
activity book. Characters that populated the first two parts—an
octopus, a cat, a monkey—now guide the reader back to
childhood to recapture the ability to play and imagine.
The exercises,
which center on the thoughts produced by random words, are
not unlike ones you might find in books like The Artist's
Way, but they are a lot more fun. The only thing missing
are some pictures in Barry's style to trace. No doubt she
wants readers to draw their own doodles.
The transition
between the various sections is seamless, thanks to the unifying
element of Barry's drawings. What It Is has moments
of sadness and heartbreak, elements of surrealism, and concrete
instructions on energizing the creative process. What might
be hokey in less adept hands, Barry makes delightful and inspirational.
(June,
2008)
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