Pretending Is Lying
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet, Pretending is Lying is a memoir unlike any other.
In a series of dazzling fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white—Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents.
The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma—a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography. In her English-language debut, Goblet, an acclaimed comics pioneer in her native Belgium, juxtaposes her relationships with her alcoholic blowhard father, her distant partner, her abusive mother, and her combative daughter in a kaleidoscope of relationships turned into tugs-of-war. (In a short afterword, Goblet's partner, Guy Marc Hinant, gets to the heart of this supposedly autobiographical work, suggesting that his own appearance in Goblet's book does not constitute an actual appearance by him, but by an "avatar" that inhabits Goblet's fictionalized truth.) Goblet changes her art style throughout sometimes employing almost amateurish line scrawls, other times rich, mysterious, hazy color washes, and just about any style in between to create a vivid and puzzling representation of emotional memory and the ways the brain retells stories to yourself in order to help you bear them.
