One! Hundred! Demons!

"e;You'll wonder how anything can be so sad and so funny at the same time."e;-Lev Grossman, TimeInspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One! Hundred! Demons! an enduring classic of the early twenty-first century. In the book s intro, however, Barry throws the idea of truth out of the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins autobiofictionalography. As readers get to know Barry s demons, they realize that the actual truth no longer matters because the universality of Barry s comics, true or untrue, reigns supreme.