The best graphic nonfiction that focuses on women

Picked by Sivan Piatigorsky-Roth

Book cover of Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Book cover of The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures

What did I love about each book?

List by Sivan Piatigorsky-Roth

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Why am I passionate about this?

I have been passionate about making, reading, and studying comics for my whole life. When I first encountered autobiographical comics, they were all by women who I looked up to for their ability to tackle their lives with both words and images. This is a small list and biased towards the cartoonists I first encountered in the world of female autobiographical comics. There is so much more out there. I love how the flexibility and history of the comic form have allowed for so much blending of genres and styles.

The books I picked & why

You and a Bike and a Road

By Eleanor Davis,

Why did I love this book?

This book is Eleanor Davis’s gorgeous travel documentary of her 2016 cross-country bike tour. Her lines are so vivid and alive, and her day-by-day recounting of the details of her body, her bike, and the country changing around her is both simple and intricate. All of her work is amazing, but this one is definitely a standout.

You and a Bike and a Road

By Eleanor Davis,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked You and a Bike and a Road as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A two-wheeled journey across the landscape of America, and through the heart and mind of an artist.

Eleanor Davis’s bike tour from Tucson, Arizona to Athens, Georgia is a quest of epic proportions ― not just geographically, which it surely is, but inwardly as well. While facing off formidable headwinds, drivers with reckless abandon, and screaming knee pain, the author confronts an even greater challenge ― her own mind. Life on two wheels teaches her many lessons, and she narrates them with keen observation and self-deprecating candor through a series of funny, touching vignettes. Companionship from fellow travelers and the…

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Rat Time

By Keiler Roberts,

Why did I love this book?

Keiler Roberts has a number of books featuring vignettes from her daily life. All are incredible. This is a personal favorite, cleverly balancing medical scenes about her MS treatment and diagnosis, her work as an art teacher, her life with her daughter and husband (and their family rats), and private moments with herself.

Rat Time

By Keiler Roberts,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rat Time as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Pet deaths and parenting, embarrassing childhood memories and mental illness, Roberts documents her daily life’s minutiae, its up and downs, with the deftness of an observational comedian. Her comics demonstrate that sometimes life can deal you a punch to the gut, but it doesn’t have to be devoid of a punch line.

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Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel,

Why did I love this book?

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s most famous work (and it is phenomenal), but this one captured my heart. While the former focuses on her father, here Bechdel turns her focus on her relationship with her mother, weaving in a lot of psychoanalysis and modernist literature.

Bechdel’s characteristic intricacy and attention to detail are on full display, and the frequent inclusion of dreams and their interpretation (a particular interest of mine) make the whole book feel almost surreal yet completely grounded.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven.

Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

'As absorbing as…

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Need More Love

By Aline Kominsky Crumb,

Why did I love this book?

I owe so much to this book. Aline Kominsky-Crumb pulls her art and comics from multiple decades of her life into this huge collection, making an incredible mixed-media autobiography that captures so much of who she was. Her unfiltered honesty set the bar high for what autobiographical comics could be.

Need More Love

By Aline Kominsky Crumb,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Need More Love as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, one of the earliest female cartoonists, presents a collection of her own highly inventive and daring artwork from over four decades, along with unusual photographs and memorabilia. The road to becoming an underground- comics legend begins with Komisky-Crumb as a nice jewish girl from Long Island, carries her to Greenwich Village in the 1960's, and to California, land of hippy cartoonists, and on to a more or less sedate life with hubby(equally legendary R. Crumb) and daughter, Sophie. Her funny/sad tales show a woman bewildered by her place in society and determined to find her own way. These…

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Graphic novels

The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures

By Phoebe Gloeckner,

Why did I love this book?

This slightly fictionalized but largely autobiographical book is adapted from the author’s childhood diary pages and reconfigured into a sharp, beautiful, and honest narrative about a fifteen-year-old’s coming of age.

Gloeckner treats her protagonist with the kind of respect and dignity that young women are rarely afforded, and the result is an incredible account of youth, sexuality, abuse, and growing up that honors teenage girls and all they are capable of.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures

By Phoebe Gloeckner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Diary of a Teenage Girl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First released in 2002, this provocative, critically acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture starring Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, and Alexander Skarsgård.

“I don't remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness.” So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. After losing her virginity to her mother's boyfriend, Minnie pursues a string of sexual encounters (with both boys and girls) while experimenting with…

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