My New York Diary

Doucet follows her popular underground comics series Dirty Plotte with an autobiographical graphic novel chronicling her six-month stint as a New Yorker. The book opens when Doucet is 17, just graduated from an all-girls' school in Canada. Before she leaves for New York, she loses her virginity, confronts the deadly monotony of art school and endures a suicide attempt by an odd and pathetic boyfriend. It's soon clear that Doucet learns things the hard way, but in New York City she finds another boyfriend and gives love a second shot. It isn't long, though, before she's in a downward spiral, suffering from both a mysterious bout of seizures and the new boyfriend--who, it turns out, is grimly possessive and a bit of a psycho to boot--so Doucet must plan an escape from him. Full of their author's most intimate and painful moments, Doucet's comics bring a depth of humanity and a deadpan humor to a succession of personal calamities. Doucet's unapologetic candor captures the harsh realities of her life and the pluck (and luck) that gets her out of one self-inflicted jam after another. Much like her life, her black-and-white drawings are complex, detailed and cluttered, and transform the hard knocks and bad decisions of a somewhat innocent underground cartoonist into wonderfully charming tales of urban survival. (Dec.)