The Joy of Quitting
Keiler Roberts. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-77046-622-7
Roberts (My Begging Chart) gathers the finest of her bemused appraisals of domesticity in this retrospective autobiographical collection. Crystallized in single panels or teased out in longer discursive ruminations, these comics traverse the mundane routines of parenting, pet care, teaching, mental health, and the struggle to carve out space amidst all that to make art. Roberts has an unparalleled ear for dialogue, and favors a direct, deadpan approach, framing enigmatic exchanges with minimal context, and rendering them in lively, unfussy black-and-white line art. Daughter Xia’s pre-K years provide many memorable vignettes. Awash in bathroom talk, disarming role-play, and experiments with swearing, this is top-shelf “stuff my kid says” material, of immediate appeal to anyone who has ever spent time around small children. But it’s a lot more interesting than just that, accumulating in a colorful portrait of the extreme closeness shared by Roberts and her daughter, and of the inevitable renunciation of a parent’s private life. Of course, when Xia exclaims on one page, “Don’t put this in a comic,” it’s clear that the loss of privacy cuts both ways. In other sequences, Roberts details with unflinching candor how she’s navigated bipolar disorder and its many incumbent health care aggravations. Often laugh-out-loud funny, these unaffected stories feel lived-in, above all, and usually land with a perseverant chortle. Roberts is one of our funniest and most lucid authors on the supposedly incidental details of the everyday, and this collection is an ideal entry point for readers new to her work.
This review was written for Publishers Weekly, but was not used.