Lynda Barry

One Hundred Demons

Lara Engle

Maybe I've reached a saturation point in memoirs. Or maybe this one just wasn't my jam. But either way, I didn't particularly enjoy this. It seemed like so much navel-gazing without much real introspection. It didn't help that the artwork isn't my style, either.

I'm not saying it's a bad book. I just didn't enjoy it.

rumbledethumps

An open, honest, and vulnerable memoir-ish book, with vignettes of the "demons" that still sometimes haunt her.

After first not getting her and being put off by her illustration style, I now love Lynda Barry. I almost wrote, "I now get..." but I'm not sure I do. I just know that I can't get enough of her instructional comics memoirs, or whatever other genre she flirts with but doesn't quite fall into. She is utterly unique, and I want to read everything she's written.

Gavin

Elaborately naive autobiography. Barry is apeing children’s books with her giant all caps lettering and pupilless eyes and primary colours, but she’s surprisingly unsentimental. Unpromising start, with simple loneliness and childhood grotesques, but her teens were pretty extreme, and more than halfway through one of the chapters, “Cicadas”, is very moving. Her punkish positivity and self-criticism carries her through, makes you want to make something crude and idiosyncratic.

One Hundred Demons

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