The world is too much with us. And I feel like my hair is on fire.

Thankfully, I’ve just rediscovered the graphic novel, and not a moment too soon. We chose Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! for our September book club offering. I’ve always been a fan of Barry’s – ever since Ernie Pook’s Comeek ran in the San Diego alternative weekly. (That was alongside Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, which I mostly didn’t understand or care for, even though I religiously read it every week as well.)

Barry called Demons an “autobifictionalography.” Imagine taking the biggest blunders, the deepest illusions, the most embarrassing and cringe-worthy moves of your life, the memories that poke through your veneer in odd moments, and having the self-acceptance to turn them into tiny heartbreaking, comical epics.

It features short vignettes showing the demons from her life: head lice; a boyfriend who puts her down mercilessly; ditching a best friend because she’s two years younger; a first job where she’s abandoned by the hippies who hire her and never pay her; an acid trip with another boyfriend through Chinatown; fights with her mom. The tales are heartbreaking and comical. And the art, as always with Barry, is whimsical and entirely unique.

While discussing Demons my book club peeps mentioned other graphic novels, all of which I’ve now devoured or put on reserve at the library:

George Takei: They Called Us Enemy (about the imprisonment without due process of Japanese Americans during WWII);

Shaun Tan‘s wordless The Arrival, about the mystifying journeys immigrants must go through in moving to new lands and inching their way to a feeling of belonging; and

Alison Bechdel’s Spent, in which she -- as a fictional version of herself -- runs a pygmy goat farm in Vermont, surrounded by cats, and struggles with selling (and selling out of) her latest unwritten book to “Megalopub,” owned by a “conservative media mogul” out to destroy democracy, for an amount that could set her up financially for life.

Why do I say, not a moment too soon to rediscover graphic novels? Because my concentration is shot. (Unlike Ms Wife, who could read for hours, given the right book and chair.) In an era when uppercase Truth Social feeds drive the news cycle, cultural conversation and gestalt of the entire country’s dire and falling fortunes, my brain pinballs from one atrocity to another. I have begun to wonder seriously, when your world embodies the plotlines of horror novels, why bother reading fiction?

Graphic novels give me an excuse to keep consuming books. When the words float off the page, the pictures keep unreeling the story for me, and I can follow those.

The next book my book club is reading is called The Cello, a nonfiction work by cellist Kate Kennedy that profiles the stories of four other cellists who have suffered grave misfortunes, including one who was disappeared into the Nazi death machinery, never to be heard from again. I bring it up because Kennedy writes movingly about the Auschwitz orchestras.

When words are inadequate, turn to the artists. They find other ways to express the human condition, and I say, blessings upon them.

On to joy!

A friend took me on a “bridge” walk in Portland. We crossed two bridges and came to “Poetry at the Beach,” a walkway where kids contributed poems that were etched into rocks.

Also, we happened to be there the very day a local dragon race was taking place. Nothing like watching 20 women paddling in sync for a good three and a half minutes while a drummer keeps the beat in the bow of the boat racing against three other teams doing the same to help me pick up my own pace.

Then breakfast at Water Avenue, a lowkey coffee shop in one of those industrial neighborhoods where you wonder why they’re open on a Sunday morning. I’m glad. We sat over pastry and hot drinks and watched the arrival and departure of families and couples and a group of young women quietly planning, I hope, a revolution.

Walked downtown on a Friday afternoon to catch Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale with that same friend. What a lovely, slow moving paean to a different place and time. I gobbled it up alongside my frozen Jr. Mints.

A young family will grow by one soon, and I was invited by that friend to a baby shower to celebrate the occasion. I haven’t been to one of these in a very long time. This do featured cornhole, tamales, a wandering wagging pup, and completely adorable toddlers being led by grandparents to the bounce house. I didn’t sink into a single bad thought for a good two hours. Baby showers: highly recommended for the absolute diversions they provide.

And I have discovered the wonders of British writer and producer Sally Wainwright, the brilliant creator behind Last Tango in Halifax, Gentleman Jack and Happy Valley. The nights don’t stretch long enough to accommodate my appetite for these shows . Watching Sarah Lancashire, Nicola Walker or Suranne Jones take on the world makes me feel stronger too.

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