Published in 2017
192 pages
Chelsea Martin is the author of Everything Was Fine Until Whatever (2009); The Really Funny Thing About Apathy (2010); Even Though I Don’t Miss You (2013), named one of the Best Indie Books of 2013 by Dazed magazine; and Mickey (2016). Her work has appeared in publications including the Poetry Foundation, Hobart, Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, Vice, and Catapult, and chosen as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She is a comic artist and illustrator and the creative director of Universal Error. She holds a BFA from California College of the Arts and currently lives in Spokane, Washington.
What is this book about?
Funny, candid, and searchingly self-aware, this essay collection tells the story of Chelsea Martin’s coming of age as an artist. We are with Chelsea as an eleven-year-old atheist, trying to will an alien visitation to her neighborhood; fighting with her stepfather and grappling with a Tourette’s diagnosis as she becomes a teenager; falling under the sway of frenemies and crushes in high school; going into debt to afford what might be a meaningless education at an expensive art college; navigating the messy process of falling in love with a close friend; and struggling for independence from her emotionally manipulative father and from the family and friends in the dead-end California town that has defined her upbringing. This is a book about relationships, class, art, sex, money, and family–and about growing up weird, and poor, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
