By Scott Stossel, The New York Times, September 17, 2019
When you’ve been in psychotherapy for as long as I have, you end up talking to your therapists from time to time about writers — Freud and Kierkegaard, let’s say, or Brené Brown and Tara Brach — whose insights might, or so you hope, have relevance to your treatment. But no writer have I pushed more fervidly on a therapist than Raina Telgemeier.
“Look at this,” I said to my psychologist a few weeks ago, thrusting some splayed-open pages of Telgemeier’s new book under his nose so urgently that he leaned back in his chair and looked a bit alarmed. “Now, read these three pages,” I said, flipping ahead. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Though her name might conjure an image of a Teutonic psychotherapist or Kierkegaard scholar, Telgemeier is neither a psychologist nor a philosopher but rather, as nearly every American girl who has passed through elementary school in the last decade knows, a graphic novelist who writes about the social travails and family dynamics of early adolescence. Since 2010, when she overcame the prognostications of shortsighted publishing executives who claimed girls wouldn’t buy comics, she has seen one book after another propelled to the top of the best-seller lists by her avid young fans, who show up by the thousands for her appearances. Telgemeier is like the Beatles, or maybe the J. K. Rowling, of graphic novels.
Comments (0)