Secret Weirdo

By Lauren Barnett

Well, for a twenty-page minicomic that is filled with embarrassing stories about childhood, cat police, imaginary adventures, and an opening page offering “free hugs,” artist Lauren Barnett definitely set herself up for a difficult task. One of her biggest pet peeves as a female artist is having her comics be called cute. “I think ‘cute’ is a terrible way to describe someone’s work,” she exclaims in one of the first frames.

Besides the political cry for gender equality in the artistic community in the first few pages, Secret Weirdo is an eclectic collection of stories (or rather confessions) about the artist’s endeavors as a secret weirdo. Barnett’s comical, autobiographical telling of her obsessive entrepreneurial ventures as a child, unusual birthday present request, sick day science experiment with a frozen egg, kleptomania, and more are interrupted by imaginative pages with the Cat Police and imaginary Adventures of Master Driver and Navigirl—alter egos perhaps?

What most attracts me to her style is the lack of pretentiousness in her art. The cover is a gorgeous abstract watercolor that is both lovely and haunting; the inside frames are made up of simple, flat, black and white line drawings, messy bubbles, and scribbled text that give it what one reviewer noted as a "draw now, ask questions later" style, almost as if she is making it up as she goes along.

While her comics might seem cute superficially, there is clearly a darker, deeper level to her appropriated cute imagery; her “adorable” childhood stories are intersected with short, anxiety-filled frames about adulthood: debt, apartment searches, the dangers of diet soda. These glimpses into her personal, intimate realm are quickly interrupted by embarrassed sarcasm, or more Secret Weirdo stories from childhood, because the reality is far too daunting to dwell on. It leaves the reader wishing for more of this darkness, but still leaving us with the knowledge that there is something else behind the 'cuteness'.

In short, even though the stories are oddly specific and personal, the ambition, sarcasm, curiosity, anxiety, and nostalgia of a child and young woman resonated with me strongly, and I recommend this minicomic to other adults and teens that can handle the occasional F-bomb and sarcasm. Also, although the styles and content are completely different, I enjoyed Secret Weirdo for the same autobiographical, humorous, deeply personal snippets of Erika Moen’s DAR! Comic, so if you like Barnett’s work, read some of this, too!

Review by Abigail Chance

Falling Apart In One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

By Stacy Morrison
Simon & Schuster

I’m one of the many women who have been through divorce so I picked up Stacy Morrison’s memoir Falling Apart in One Piece, about her divorce, with interest. Because few of my friends and family members have experienced divorce, it’s been one long lonely road for me. How do people deal with the guilt? I’ve wondered. How do they stop worrying about their ex—even after they’ve fallen in love with somebody else?

Less literary and more chatty-confessional style—in vogue with the women’s magazines that Morrison has edited all these years (Mirabella and Marie Claire, for example, or, most recently, Redbook)—Morrison relates her tale like a woman sitting down over a cup of tea with a friend. Her story takes us to the heart of despair in the wake of divorce. Though Morrison’s husband didn’t abandon their son, he left her holding the bag for a house that was falling apart around her. Morrison soon realized that she was literally living a metaphor, the house a perfect symbol of her crumbling marriage.

What did I do wrong? Morrison wonders. How could I have believed in marriage, only to be fooled? How could marriage have been just the thing I needed, while my husband felt like it was sucking his soul dry? And, most importantly, How am I ever going to be a single mom? How am I going to afford it? How am I going to get rid of this damned house? Even as she takes a new job as Editor-in-Chief of Redbook Magazine, Morrison wonders if she’s a fraud. Can she promote marriage and family when her own has disintegrated?

Through all her financial struggles, loneliness, self-doubt, and desolation, Morrison works hard not to become bitter or angry, so that she and her former husband can be good parents to their son. She comes through it with hope for the future and a new-found respect for her own abilities to make it through anything.

Falling Apart in One Piece is neither a literary masterpiece nor a self-help manual, but it is another genre somewhere in between those two—a personal story of heartache, loss, and hope, told honestly and thoughtfully. Definitely worth reading for those who have been through divorce and want to understand their own muddled emotions.

Review by Jessica Powers