A graphic novel tackling infertility could be grim, especially when it doesn’t end with the desired baby. When it’s done with the spirit and humor that Potts brings to her story, though, it’s nearly impossible to put down. Phoebe Potts’ Good Eggs will be published in September by HarperCollins. Overwhelmingly likeable on the page, Potts tells the story of her and her husband’s frustrated efforts to have a child with equal parts comedy and pure narrative skill.

When they can’t get pregnant, they embark on a rollercoaster ride of fertility treatments, emotional ups and downs, and a constant barrage of input from everyone they know. As if that’s not enough to fill a book, Potts delves into her colorful career as a political activist, her history of depression, her evolving relationship to Judaism, and her relationships with the family and friends who surround and support her, along the way.

But Potts pulls it off, her narrative leading you forward even as you eagerly delve into her past. Her funny and colloquial drawings provoke laughter and affectionate sympathy. Illustrations of eggs complaining and shouting with joy as they’re released en masse from her ovaries following fertilization treatments, the personality of Reuben the cat, and digressions from difficult conversations to map out the primary areas of her and her husband’s brains are just a few of the laughs and insights Potts has to offer. She talked with PW Comics Week by phone from her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

PW Comics Week: Your book is so fantastic but, as we see in the story, you’ve always been a painter. How’d you get into doing comics?

PP: I started as a teenager when I so desperately wanted to be heard in my adolescent angst that I didn't trust anyone to just see pictures or just hear stories; I had to write it and draw it for you so you would absolutely get it. That's always been one of my neuroses so I got very good at telling stories about myself.

PWCW: And in the book we see you making comics for family and friends.

PP: Yeah, that started when I was going through one of my miserable periods and I'd write these comics basically to make my friends and family laugh but also to turn this experience into something productive. My immediate circle wanted to know what was going on with my lousy job and the fertility stuff, and drawing it was a way to survive, a way to be creative when I wasn’t.

PWCW: I saw that you thank another great graphic novel memoirist, Paul Karasik, in the acknowledgements. What’s the connection?

PP: Oh, Paul’s a dear friend of mine! When I was living with my parents on the Vineyard and I was so depressed, we'd get together and draw every week. He fed me all the contemporary comics, so that's how I learned about Charles Burns and Chris Ware. Then one day, I was telling him and his wife about the fertility stuff, and he said gimme five pages on fertility. I did and the book started from there.

PWCW: How do you see yourself fitting into the lineage of female graphic novelists?

PP: I was hoping you'd ask that because women's voices have only been getting louder and clearer and easier to hear in comics in recent years. I mean the reason I'm even getting published is that I'm standing on the shoulders of Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry. It's very refreshing to me and encouraging that they all came forward and got the attention they deserved. They write difficult personal stories that are uplifting which, I think, is what art's supposed to do, engage and uplift. I’m lucky to come after them. I just happened to be the right infertile female comic book writer at the right time.

PWCW: One thing I love about Good Eggs is how well you depict a happy marriage. We get so many unhappy couples in comics and other media.

PP: The Jeff character is definitely the foil to my jokes. I don't do a lot of his inner life in the book, a) because I like to have center stage, and b) because I wouldn't presume to know all that he's thinking and feeling, but Jeff's very good at taking care of me, and I wanted to show that. He likes to say about the book, “It's not accurate but it's all true.”

PWCW: You mention at the end of the book that you’re pursuing adoption next.

PP: Yeah, we are deep, deep, deep into the adoption process, and, jeez, fertility has nothing on adoption as far as being traumatic and morally suspect. We witnessed the birth of what we thought was our son only to be sent home empty-handed. We decided to try for international adoption after that. Right now our paperwork’s in Ethiopia and we’re just waiting for a phone call.

PWCW: Are you working on a book as you go?

PP: I do think there’s a book in the adoption process. It's such an eye-opener this world of baby-making. I've been writing about it, drawing about it, but it needs more time until it becomes a story. I definitely want to expose what goes on in adoption but I don't think pouring my anger out on paper really does anyone any good. In any case, I love story-telling and drawing and I want to keep doing it. I just feel like I've found the thing that gives me a right to be on the planet.