Qualification

August 1, 2019
A family steeped in 12-step recovery risks addiction to 12-step programs. Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, 2008), who has provided illustrations for the New York Times, New Yorker, McSweeney's, and other publications, pairs deceptively simple drawings with transparently direct text. Though the book is divided into 12 chapters, it doesn't really involve working all 12 steps until the last. Before that, Heatley delves deeply into a life that is as complex and messy as any, that refuses to untangle through easy epiphanies, and that doesn't resolve itself the way readers may anticipate. Throughout his life, the artist has been drawn to--and suspicious of--12-step programs since his parents were involved in numerous ones, often simultaneously. He heard the jargon and witnessed the results as his mother transformed herself (at least temporarily) through Overeaters Anonymous and changed the family's dynamic enough to divorce his father, who had issues with debt (and at least borderline sexual abuse of his sons). At various times, the author was addicted to pornography, spending, shoplifting, and attracting romantic attention. He and his wife fought frequently, most often over their financial instability but about his various 12-step programs as well, which she felt he was using as an escape from domestic tension. He felt he was becoming addicted to those arguments. He saw his brother walk a thin line between spiritual fervor and madness, and he resented the way that his mother responded to every complication in any of their lives with 12-step bromides. He supplemented his programs with therapy, and he found counseling and 12-stepping to be at odds with each other. "It was clear to me that I had a spiritual disease," he admits, yet finding the cure proved confusing. This graphic narrative, rich in detail and reflection, shouldn't be read quickly in one sitting but rather savored. Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.

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Starred review from August 26, 2019
Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down) recounts in squirmy, funny detail a chaotic childhood that leads to an ironic “addiction” to recovery programs in this ultra-candid memoir. His self-absorbed parents love God, Overeaters Anonymous, and AA, leaving little time for their three sons, all of whom stumble into adulthood seeking parental figures in the form of convenient metanarratives. David struggles—with money, porn, and his loyal but frustrated girlfriend-then-wife Rebecca—but it’s not clear he’s an addict to anything in particular. He revels in the “God burst” (drawn as a halo-like bubble around his head) he experiences every time he gets to share at a meeting, especially when chosen for “qualification,” 12-step lingo for a featured confessional moment. He chases inner peace so hard that he nearly ruins his life, an experience to which any searcher with an ego will relate. With scrunchy faces and lumpy bodies, the characters he meets along the way—the Debtors Anonymous treasurer who makes off with the group’s cash, the guy who brings a blow-up doll to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting—form a tragicomic backdrop. Eventually, David begins listening to his own doubts about “working the programs,” and starts seeing a Jungian analyst who helps him in a subtler but more profound way. Heatley’s hefty inventory proves both sobering and spirit-lifting.

Starred review from October 1, 2019

Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down) explores four decades of his life in what may well be one of the most unflinchingly honest and emotionally raw memoirs ever written. As a child, Heatley's volatile and sexually inappropriate father and overachieving mother are too wrapped up in their own struggles to notice his growing anxiety and inability to form healthy relationships. His young adulthood, and extending into his marriage to supportive wife, Rebecca, as well as fatherhood, is marred by compulsive sexual behavior, money trouble, bitter resentment toward nearly everyone in his life, and shame at his inability to get his act together. Initial encounters with recovery groups leave him cold, but his need for structure and a sense of community eventually leads him into a tumultuous and possibly unhealthy dependence upon 12-step support groups for those struggling with alcohol, debt, overeating, and sex and love addiction. VERDICT Whether the painful, incredibly personal details Heatley shares are an expression of uncommon bravery or narcissism is debatable, but readers will find themselves moved by this stunning memoir, and perhaps even grateful for the author's refusal to shy away from depicting the complexity of his ongoing development as an artist and a human being.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2019
The payoffs and pitfalls of a lifetime spent in 12-step programs are portrayed with brutal candor in Heatley's unflinching graphic memoir of his decades-long search for solutions to his vices. His sexually ambivalent father and workaholic mother failed to see their son's various problems: physical abuse by friends, shoplifting, and getting stoned. His parents eventually sent him to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first in a series of programs?Co-Dependents Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous?that came to dominate his life. Along the way, he also contended with his responsibilities to his wife and children, the struggle to balance his artistic pursuits with unfulfilling jobs, his brother's mental illness, and his parents' continued hardships. Although Heatley also turned to religion and therapy, the meetings and their concomitant activities remained the focus of his existence, raising the question of where to turn when you're addicted to 12-step programs. The copious captions and dialogue balloons tend to dominate Heatley's simple, nearly naive drawings, but the combination effectively conveys Heatley's obsessive quest for recovery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)