Kiss & Tell

January 24, 2011
The series of sketches that make up this memoir are arranged by the author/narrator's age, beginning with before her birth, when we see her parents meet in Japan. In bold, graphic black and white drawings, sometimes reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi, the author describes a frankly startling range of shenanigans in her early teenage years. These include long stints as a runaway and many sexual and romantic entanglements along the way. Never flinching from the down and dirty details of what went on with all these guys (and, eventually, girls), the author gives a refreshing and poignant look at early sexual experience and romance, including the actually dirty, the tragic, and the semisweet. Unfortunately, this "résumé" doesn't present in-depth exploration of the character holding them all together. It comes as a surprise, for instance, when she runs away from home and stays away for three months, with the emotional ramifications of that only nominally acknowledged by the quick summary of her later maturing process in an epilogue. MariNaomi does a wonderful job of painting a series of portraits of moments of adolescence, capturing its awkwardness and strangeness and excitement, but a greater whole never emerges.

December 15, 2010

Girlish innocence and disarming candor mark a graphic memoir that often reads like an illustrated diary.

Whether she's writing about threesomes, foursomes or the possibility of moresomes, the San Francisco–based cartoonist MariNaomi exudes a sweetness undefiled by experience. She begins before her birth, with the courtship of her father, an Army officer teaching English in Japan, and his teenage pupil, nine years younger. The author dedicates the book to her parents, "who I pray will still speak to me after they read [it]," and then proceeds to detail her encounters, year-by-year, with a variety of boys and an occasional girl. She begins with a chapter titled "The most beautiful penis I've ever seen," describing her sexual awakening in an episode that others might consider pedophilia. The story introduces the image of the butterfly, through which stages of development the book progresses. The vast majority of her encounters take no more than one page, six panels at most, making the longer episodes seem all the more ambitious and creatively audacious. One of them recounts her loss of virginity at age 14 ("Even though it got better, I was glad when it was over"), and another vividly describes her maiden voyage on LSD. As she matures, MariNaomi often presents herself as clueless about what she was doing, why and with whom, whether she was the seducer or the one being seduced. She seemed to fall into sex with boys who left her shortly after, and/or with whom she had nothing in common, and/or who were originally more attracted to one of her girlfriends. Eventually, she began to find some of her girlfriends more attractive than the boys with whom she continued to involve herself.

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March 15, 2011
From a show-me-yours-and-Ill-show-you-mine encounter to long-term open relationships with men and women, MariNaomis frank memoir traces her romantic and sexual encounters, which began at an alarmingly early age. Likening ones sexual awakening to that of a butterflys transformation risks a certain twee-ness, but MariNaomis humorous and pragmatic notions of sex and love make the motif work as a guidepost for her own age and experience. Her cartoony, black-and-white art is at times childlike and gleeful, reducing the potential luridness of her sexier encounters. For instance, the naughty bits are rarely discernable on naked human forms, and cast-off clothing float away on butterfly wings. The lighthearted style serves to channel the focus onto the real storyher growth not only as a sexual being but as a person. As her r'sum' only goes up to age 22, the ending does leave open any attempt at greater meaning: though she has her wings, she is still a work in progress. All said, this graphic memoir is a fun romp through one womans personal sexual revolution.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)