Djuna: The Extra Ordinary Life of Djuna Barnes

Macy follows up his graphic adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and Camille with a stylish graphic biography of novelist Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). Barnes’s manipulative grandmother Zadel called the shots in her family, favoring her do-nothing son over other family members, and building a utopian community on Long Island with a lack of sexual boundaries. After suffering abuse, Barnes left the fold, although she continued to send money home. As Barnes matured into a deeply ambitious, sometimes ruthless writer, she joined bohemian communities in New York and Paris and hobnobbed with Picasso, Hemingway, and Joyce. In 1928, she published Ryder, a seething fictionalized account of her upbringing that was received as farce. Eight years later came Nightwood, a dramatization of her doomed romance with the alcoholic artist Thelma Wood. Despite critical acclaim, her novels didn’t sell, and she fell into obscurity but managed to live long enough to see her novels semi-canonized. In Macy’s capable hands, Djuna’s life and work are stubborn, admirable attempts at self-determination, threaded with desperate bids for validation. His evocative black-and-white comics are punctuated by art-deco details—notably, the only color throughout is a bright auburn used for Djuna’s hair and that of the family members she can’t fully escape. Readers will marvel at Barnes’s spirit and tenacity. Agent: Madison Smartt Bell, Ayesha Pande Literary. (Oct.)