Monday, April 29, 2013

Drinking in Drinking at the Movies


Julia Wertz has definitely created a character you can love and hate at the same time. Love because she has the uncanny ability to tell it how it is and hate because she sometimes hates herself, creating in her an inability to cope with or see things for how they are, making her snarky to the point of being cruel. To be fair, as a twenty something, this confusion and self loathing is not unfamiliar and to many is simply part of growing up (I just read Meg Jay’s “The Defining Decade,” which goes to town on this subject). Wertz effectively portrays how she dealt with this angst by personifying her problem with alcohol as a constant, one on one battle between her and the bottle.
On page 90, “The Ambush” depicts Julia getting jumped by a team of liquor bottles who want to ruin her life. This is a direct example, but more indirect may be the fact that Julia runs to liquor whenever she feels upset. It took me almost to the middle of the book to realize Julia had a problem, about the point where she goes on the internet date and blacks out on a park bench. It made me question what I consider normative.
There are also serious moments when we see that Julia has a lot on her plate to deal with emotionally: her brother the addict, her stepfather’s cancer, and her seemingly somewhat difficult (we’re not talking Persepolis difficult, we’re talking divorced family in America difficult) childhood. What works in communicating these incidents or facts in her life is that she never states up front “I am feeling…such and such,” she instead will show how tense she gets when her brother has a relapse, and casually mention her childhood in a panel about holding babies. Julia’s oblique references show us what potential trigger factors are without her straight out saying how she feels. Considering this book definitely has a coming of age element, it seems possible that the reader is figuring out how Julia feels about things while the character herself is deciphering her own feelings.
It is apparent that Julia’s alcoholism is hand in hand with self loathing. On page 106, she has an entire page titled “How am I abusing my body today?.” It  seems she equates self care with a level of adulthood she thinks she hasn’t attained yet. That is what is so amusing about this book, the whole time Julia says that going through these difficult life experiences she is not being an adult, when in reality the experiences are transforming her into the woman she is to become. It is nice, also, that the author sheds light into what happens in the future, assuring us that Julia does quit drinking, and that the journey is one with a successful ending.
An entertaining book to end our class on! I’m excited to see what we’ll be talking about on Tuesday.





3 comments:

  1. This is a different image of the coming of age--pretty debauched and sad and hateful. but funny right?
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  2. I like your point about Julia as a character being someone we can love and hate. She's very funny, and yet doesn't seem terribly conscious or self-reflective, which I think goes with her age, too. The artwork and even the writing seem so simple and straightforward...I found myself having to rethink that when faced with the fact that it is still complex enough to evoke complicated feelings toward the protagonist/narrator.

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  3. "it seems possible that the reader is figuring out how Julia feels about things while the character herself is deciphering her own feelings."
    Cool insight here! Since starting to analyze memoirs its been interesting for me to think about the character/narrator split and the how and why writers construct themselves as naieve or fallible protaganists. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a craft choice, and it's interesting because then the protag becomes a foil for the reader to project their feelings onto, so the writer is actually not naieve at all.

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