Lynda Barry is best known for her comics work, but I also really love her two illustrated novels (Cruddy and The Good Times Are Killing Me), which it seems to me are somewhat overlooked (or maybe I was too young when they came out to notice their cultural impact). All her work deals with outsider teens who are dealing with abusive parents and societal alienation with no one to help them.
Cruddy is a very bleak, blackly comic novel. I like the journal-type format that it uses, as it really gets us into the mind of Roberta Rohbeson as she narrates the dark events of her childhood. Roberta is the only known survivor of the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre but has never spoken a word about it and now lives with her mother and sister in a run-down trailer. Her mother is cruel and abusive, and she and her sister hate each other. One day at school another girl talks to her and this actual human connection breaks her self-isolation and starts unspooling a series of events that I don’t want to spoil.
The writing in this book is beautiful and the illustrations are very evocative and scary at times. The whole book is like being engulfed in a fever dream — it’s the kind of book that’s all-encompassing and you read in a semi-fugue state because it’s so good. The descriptions are visceral. I love this book and I think I especially appreciate that it doesn’t hold anything back or try to temper any of the horrible things that happen to Roberta. A lot of the time I think authors can shy away from depicting the honest psychological horror of abuse and how insidious it can be, and Barry deals with it here as clearly as I think anyone could. As the NY Times review on the cover puts it, it’s “a work of terrible beauty,” which I think is as apt a description as any. I honestly consider it to be a masterpiece.
Warnings for: child abuse, drugs, drinking, murder, suicidal ideation/suicide, animal abuse.
