In one scene from Julia Wertz’s 2023 graphic memoir, “Impossible People: A Completely Average Story of Recovery,” her character — hungover, heavy-lidded and rumpled — throws wine glasses and empty booze bottles to the floor of her kitchen while pondering the difficulty of staying sober: “I drank to silence the negative nattering that constantly streamed through my head without reprieve . . . The sort of incessant nattering that takes place in the head of someone old enough to have experienced true pain . . . but still too young to put that pain into perspective.” Sitting amid the shards, she concludes that, “Drinking was my only coping mechanism for the completely ordinary experience of being alive.”
Messy rooms are a theme that runs through the comics that Wertz began self-publishing in the mid-2000s: “The Fart Party” — a name she never expected to stick. On the cover of “Impossible People,” cartoon Julia sits at a drafting table in a studio crowded with books, magazines and art supplies. The room on the cover of her new collection, “Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here): Comics on Pregnancy and Parenthood,” is a different kind of messy: lighter and plant-filled, its floor strewn with diapers and tiny socks and play mats. Cartoon Julia looks much the same as she always has, with rubbery, jointless limbs, a black bob, and enormous eyes, but she’s tired and bemused for a different reason: the baby attached to her breast.
“People have a lot of advice and warnings about how you become just a mom,” Wertz says. “I get feedback sometimes being like, ‘Oh, her work is just about having a kid now. That’s her whole life.’ And, well, a.) Of course it is. I just birthed a human being. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t do the craziest thing that humans do. But, b.) I make art about my life. So, it’s just a natural progression of things.” The ripping sound of a chainsaw keeps interrupting our phone conversation. “Everyone says living in the city is so loud. It’s like, try living in the forest, where they come and cut your trees down,” she jokes.
While “Bury Me Already” is about being a partner, becoming a parent, and the excruciatingly thin line between love and fear, it’s also about the singular way that everything involved in the ordinary condition of being a person in the world is amplified by being both an artist and a mother.
Wertz never intended to move back to Northern California, where she was born and raised and where her family still lives. She’d been living in her Brooklyn studio for 10 years, writing and drawing the Eisner-nominated books “Drinking at the Movies” and “The Infinite Wait,” when her landlord evicted her. “Illegally evicted me,” she clarifies. “But it was an illegal apartment, so I didn’t really have any recourse.” After paying $800 a month for a decade, staying in the NYC area was out of the question. “I was working on a book about New York,” she says — 2017’s history in buildings, ‘Tenements, Towers, and Trash’ — and it felt really just cruel to leave right in the middle of that book. But I couldn’t stay.”
She returned home thinking it would be temporary; instead, the life changes piled up: She reconnected with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Oliver, who previously appeared in both “The Fart Party” and “Impossible People,” and within a few years, they moved in together and were expecting. It wasn’t as idyllic as it sounds on paper: Wertz had an abortion, experienced a miscarriage, and, along with the rest of her family, had to contend with the worsening mental illness of her older brother, Josh. And then there was the pandemic. Plus, she really, really missed New York. So while “Bury Me Already” is about being a partner, becoming a parent, and the excruciatingly thin line between love and fear, it’s also about the singular way that everything involved in the ordinary condition of being a person in the world is amplified by being both an artist and a mother.
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The comics in “Bury Me Already” join those by Wertz’s peers, all of them funny and poignant — and all wrestling with the difficulty of reconciling art and motherhood. Fellow New Yorker contributor Emily Flake, in her 2015 memoir-guidebook “Mama Tried: Dispatches From the Seamy Underbelly of Modern Parenting,” writes that she accepted an illustration assignment while she was still in the hospital after the birth of her daughter. (“It’s just ingrained in me to always be available to clients, because when you’re not, they stop asking for you.”) A few years earlier, Lauren Weinstein, in the strip “If This Is All You Get,” depicted herself sitting anxiously at her drafting table, musing, “I pay a babysitter $600 a month to work on something that is probably pointless, but might make me immortal.”
“A lot of people would say, ‘Oh, you’re going to lose your sense of identity’ and, you know, forget about art for a while. I’ve never felt that,” says Wertz. “Yeah, my identity was consumed, especially in the beginning. And I did put art on hold for a full year because we didn’t have daycare because of the pandemic. But I never lost myself in that. I didn’t feel like [making comics] was slipping away. I was frustrated that I didn’t have time.”
The diary comics of interactions between stick-figure depictions of Wertz and her son, Felix, will resonate with anyone who has ever drowsed through the early, hazy days with a newborn. The loop of nursing and diaper changes and sleeping and bolting awake to do it all again.
Time is already a pervasive question mark for Wertz, who doesn’t plan the narrative arc of her books in a traditional way. “Most graphic novelists or cartoonists, they write the whole script up, submit the script, have the script edited, then they draw it and have that edited, or it’s done piece by piece. I’ll have like 500, 600 pages that I edit down to about 350, but I send it all in at once, and it’s just a giant mess of what I think works. And then my poor editor has to scramble from there and then tell me to cut a bunch of pages.” Though she knew her new book would be about having a baby during the pandemic, she wasn’t certain what would be in “Bury Me Already” until it was almost finished. “I kept adding comics. [My editor] has to have a lot of faith that I’m going to give them something they can sell, and I have to have a lot of faith that I know what I’m doing.”
Reader, she does. The diary comics of interactions between stick-figure depictions of Wertz and her son, Felix, will resonate with anyone who has ever drowsed through the early, hazy days with a newborn. The loop of nursing and diaper changes and sleeping and bolting awake to do it all again. The frequent pantslessness. The nerve-shredding sense of being half-asleep yet constantly alert. The displaced feeling that a process we’ve always been told is natural and instinctual is anything but. “Your body kind of knows what to do,” she says of the early baby days. “But, especially as someone who examines everything in their life, my brain and my body are always at war.”
There are peaceful, wondrous moments (is every infant’s real first love a ceiling fan?) and stressful ones (attempting to breastfeed while arguing with her brother’s social worker); essentially, we watch Wertz and her now-husband — they got married via Zoom during lockdown — as they become new versions of themselves. “A lot of people think that, like, [having a child] is going to give my life purpose and make me happy,” she says. “But Oliver pointed out an astute thing — I actually wish I had put this in the book — that what it actually does is make the peaks and the lows more intense. So when your kid does something, and you’re happy because you’re also filled with hormones and oxytocin, you’re over the moon, you’re so happy. But when something goes wrong — like, my kid had a heart issue when he was born — the depths are so low.”
And that’s even before hyperparenting culture, with its snappy strollers and hot-mom fashion and breezy judgments, is added to the mix. “People make money off telling women they’re failing at motherhood, which makes me so angry. I have seen friends of mine fall for this, thinking that they’re not doing it right and that they’re a bad mom. And you’re just doing what you can! The bottom line is if you’re there for your kid and you’re paying attention, you’re a good parent.”
“Bury Me Already” confronts the dissonance between Wertz’s domestic life and Josh’s increasingly chaotic one; She’s generous with her depictions of her mother and two brothers, always conscious of what is and isn’t her story to tell. “When I have comics about them, I show them before I show anybody else or before I put it in a book. And I’m like, Is this okay? Which has actually led to some very interesting insights, especially with [Josh].” And while she acknowledges that leaving out chunks of time within the narrative might fracture it, she has no interest in writing a bridge-burning, trauma-confronting memoir. “I’ll read that book. I’m not going to make that book because I don’t believe in hurting the people I love just for a book. So by the time it goes out, nobody’s feeling bad about how they’re shown. And I’m not showing their ugliest sides because, like, why? I show my ugliest sides. I don’t need to show theirs.”
Felix is now 6, and Wertz and her husband are now homeowners, but the NYC–shaped hole in her heart hasn’t yet closed. “Every day I wake up, and I’m like, I would just love to go for a walk in the city. That’s all I want to do. And then I have to go for a walk in nature, in the trees, and it’s so boring.” Part of this has to do with her non-cartooning avocation of documenting abandoned spaces, which became such an obsession during her decade in New York that she stopped making comics for two years in favor of infiltrating, with fellow urban explorers, the ruins of sanitariums, schools and abandoned resorts, often sleeping in cold, crumbling buildings to avoid detection. “The East Coast is the best for urban exploring,” she says. “On the West coast, it’s very different, but there’s still a ton of stuff. The problem is that I’m a mom now, so I’m very aware of how dangerous a hobby that is. So, before, I’d be like, well, sure, I’ll walk across this roof line, because if I fall, I’ll only break my leg, who cares? And now I’m like, I could die at any moment, and then my son would be an orphan — completely ignoring the fact that he also has a father.”
In the letter to the reader that begins “Bury Me Already,” Wertz warns, “If you’re on the fence about having a child and are hoping this book will help you clarify that decision, I’m sorry to say it won’t.” There are no how-tos or hot tips here; the rooms, let’s say, remain messy. But they’re also filled with light, and the pain has come into perspective. Ultimately, she says, “I just want to make people laugh.”
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