EVERYTHING IS AN EMERGENCY
An O.C.D. Story in Words & Pictures
By Jason Adam Katzenstein
243 pp. Harper Perennial/HarperCollins. $19.99.
The label “O.C.D.” can get tossed into conversation a little too cavalierly at times, treating obsessive-compulsive disorder like a quirky fussiness rather than the debilitating mental illness it can be. Katzenstein, a cartoonist and writer, has been battling O.C.D. most of his life, and in “Everything Is an Emergency” he shares his personal story through his art.
Katzenstein’s hand-drawn medical memoir reaches back to his early childhood. He recalls his first fears (the decorative art at his grandparents’ house, Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”) and a world that starts to crack when his parents divorce. A therapist encourages him to start creating stories, giving him a temporary sense of focus and, ultimately, a career. “Finally, I control the machine that turns my thoughts into reality,” he writes.
As he gets older and eventually receives his diagnosis, his fears give way to fixations over contamination and cleanliness, creating an obsession-compulsion loop he likens to a scratched vinyl record. “I learn that O.C.D. is an inflammation of the amygdala, the part of the brain in charge of interpreting threats,” he writes, adding later, “I’m fighting a brain battle with myself.”
Katzenstein’s written narrative describing life in the grip of the illness is intensified when those words are placed next to his illustrations — which oscillate between simple line drawings of daily routine to a frantic smear of wild strokes when he’s depicting an O.C.D. episode. He also recounts the various treatments he’s been prescribed, including pharmaceuticals like Klonopin and Zoloft, and ponders what many working artists must also worry about: the effects of brain-altering medications on creativity.
“Everything Is an Emergency” is a guided tour into a disordered mind, and the book is an education for anyone not sure what a serious case of O.C.D. does to a person. And even those not afflicted may find their own comfort in one of Katzenstein’s epiphanies: “Find the seconds that feel OK and live in them.”
GO TO SLEEP (I MISS YOU)
Cartoons From the Fog of New Parenthood
By Lucy Knisley
178 pp. First Second. $14.99.
“Having a baby derailed my work, my brain, my body and the whole damn train,” the author and illustrator Knisley writes in the first pages of “Go to Sleep (I Miss You).” Her train, however, is back on track, and in this book, she takes the reader on a breezy ride of postpartum expression.
“Go to Sleep (I Miss You)” is not a comprehensive graphic memoir of life with an infant, nor is it anchored by the firm structure of a new-parenthood guide. Instead, Knisley has crafted a collection of one-page anecdotes and lovingly scrawled sense memories of her early days as a new mother. “Having previously used drawing as a way to understand the world,” she writes, “I was now using it to discover a completely new world and person and way of life — all of which felt at once bafflingly foreign and very sweet.”
Depending on where one is (or not) on the parenting spectrum, “bafflingly foreign and very sweet” can also describe her book. Grouped loosely by thematic topics, “Go to Sleep (I Miss You)” may be most appreciated by readers looking for reassurance as they make their way through their own maternal maze. For those with frazzled attention spans, Knisley’s stream-of-consciousness baby experiences and bright drawing style make it easy to dip in and out of the pages at will.
There’s an entire section devoted to the physical and mental experience of breastfeeding and another whole chapter titled “Bodily Fluids.” The baby’s father makes several appearances, but he gets third billing after mother and child. Many of Knisley’s cartoons are so gleefully giddy you can feel the oxytocin wafting off the page, but she also doesn’t shy away from the gritty side of motherhood, depicting herself physically melting away in despair while clutching her squalling child — or appearing as an exhausted skeleton in a drawing captioned, “Some days it feels like there’s nothing left.”
“These little sketchbook cartoons are my effort to feel less alone and crazy at a time when most people feel alone and crazy,” Knisley writes. Along with the baby love, the book also celebrates the healing power of art, overloaded diaper gags and all.
I WILL JUDGE YOU BY YOUR BOOKSHELF
By Grant Snider
128 pp. Harry N. Abrams. $16.99.
While his book’s title may feel like a zeitgeisty nod to the “credibility bookcase” backdrop used in many home-quarantine video interviews these days, Snider’s zeal for the reading life has long been evident in the literary-themed cartoons he’s done for years on his incidentalcomics.com website and in The Kansas City Star — and in his frequent contributions here in the pages of the Book Review. With “I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf,” Snider — an artist, writer and orthodontist — has gathered up a decade’s worth of his comics for boisterous bookworms into one convenient volume.
If you couldn’t tell from his illustrations, Snider freely admits up front, “I’m in love with books,” in a full-page handwritten confessional. But as cartoonists are expected to show and tell, he soon gets down to business in a colorful run of stand-alone comics, each its own little adventure.
The book includes his simpler constructions that use blunt visual puns to show, for example, “Reading Is Dangerous” and that speed by quickly. But his single-panel fantasy worlds mapping out places like “The Writer’s Block” are so crammed with detail you may find your nose touching the page for several minutes as you lean close to see all the jokes. And if you don’t love books, perhaps this particular one is not for you.
Another section of “I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf” features several cartoons offering encouragement to aspiring authors. He even riffs on the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” chart with a 20-panel version for writers that starts (correctly) with caffeine.
The collection includes warm multi-panel odes to poetry, children in libraries and banned books. Snider’s thoughtful cartoons for bibliophiles also reveal he’s a well-rounded reader himself. He’s whipped up a Haruki Murakami-themed bingo card with squares referencing recurring elements in the novelist’s work, and added a page full of new “story shapes” to complement a writing lecture by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. — and all the while giving his readers an engaging glimpse into his own bookshelf and inspirations.
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Cartoonists Tackle the Big Stuff: O.C.D., Motherhood and Too Many Books - The New York Times
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