If you or someone close to you have gone through the chaos of a wedding, Knisley’s witty observations will likely be particularly resonant. In addition to laying out the specifics of Knisley’s journey, the narrative delves into the broader issues which she was forced to confront in the process, such as the inherent sexism of the wedding industry and the risk of friends and family erasing her identity as a bisexual woman. This novel-length graphic memoir tells the story of Lucy Knisley’s wedding, from the hectic preparations to the day itself. Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride, by Lucy Knisley The five books below are some of my favourite examples of the genre, but there are many more brilliant graphic memoirs to discover.ġ. For similar reasons, these memoirs tend to focus on a specific theme or experience rather than summarizing an entire life, which is one of the most compelling elements of the genre–you can find a graphic memoir on almost any topic, from the frustration of trying to get pregnant to the unexpected sense of home a Québécois woman discovered while living in a van in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Because there isn’t a huge audience clamouring for a behind-the-scenes glimpse at their lives, graphic memoirists invest enormous amounts of work crafting visual stories with the potential to entertain, inspire, or resonate with a reader who has never heard of them before. While these books are also intended to recount the events of the authors’ lives, they are, by definition, written by comic artists and graphic novelists, so the authors are very rarely household names. One unfortunate consequence of this celebrity memoir explosion is that it’s obscured a seemingly similar genre which contains an enormous variety of complex stories told in unconventional ways: graphic memoirs. As a result, memoirs have acquired a reputation as shallow, low-quality reads even articles highlighting stand-out examples have titles like “ 33 Celebrity Books That Are Actually Really Good ” and “ This One’s Better Than Your Average Celebrity Memoir.” Because publishers rely on the author’s popularity as a guarantee of sales, they tend to be edited and revised much less scrupulously than other books, and the effects of this oversight are often extremely evident.

However, as John Harris laments in this Guardian opinion piece, celebrity memoirs often make for disappointing reading material. As book genres go, memoir might be considered one of the most mainstream–every few weeks, another celebrity seems to publish a book about their life, often selling tens of thousands of copies.

Little Fish by Ramsey Beyer