Why am I passionate about this?
I am a lover of champagne and popular culture and am fascinated with how humor can be used to confront taboo topics and subvert familiar orthodoxies. As a cultural critic, I study how visual artists challenge notions of childhood innocence by adding images of drinking and drunkenness to their adaptations of children’s texts and childish objects. Through these re-imaginings, we see how children’s culture is drinking culture. The most important lessons about alcohol and childhood in the drinking curriculum walk a fine line between humor and dread. My other books include Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence and Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (with Leigh Gilmore).
Elizabeth's book list on alcohol and childhood between horror and humor
Why did Elizabeth love this book?
I love all of Lynda Barry’s comics, but It’s So Magic! is my favorite collection.
Barry’s adolescent heroines steal wine from parents and from synagogues; they drink the cheap stuff like Boones Farm Apple Wine, and concoctions of mixed hard liquor made from whatever they can find in their houses that give the reader a hangover just thinking about it.
Barry’s graphic narratives also include stories of sexual abuse that are visually overlaid with gross-out drinking humor that will make some laugh and others turn away. Through visual humor, she brings into view both drinking girls and knowledge about sexual assault often hidden from view.
Barry’s alternative lessons remain radical in this politically fraught time when neo-temperance advocates attempt to tie #MeToo to abstinence, once again trying to enforce the idea that girls and women are to blame if they drink too much alcohol.
1 author picked It's So Magic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Lynda Barry s Ernie Pook s Comeek... made the world look wild, ugly, joyful, and mysterious.' The New Yorker. Maybonne Mullen is 'riding on a bummer' according to her little sister, Marlys. As much as teenage Maybonne prays and tries she just can t connect to the magic of living. How can she when there s so much upheaval at home and school, not to mention the world at large? And yet Marlys always seems able to tap into it. In It s So Magic, the Mullen family dynamics are in flux. Uncle John makes a brief return to town…