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When you’re a parent who loves to read—or as the case is for me, happily, makes his living from reading—the first time you see your child become obsessed with an author is a genuine thrill. For both of my daughters, that author was Raina Telgemeier. The graphic novelist, best known for her trio of memoirs about her anxious preteen years, Smile, Sisters, and Guts, is referred to in my house simply as “Raina.” Apparently we’re not alone, as Jordan Kisner’s profile this week makes clear. Telgemeier is beloved for the way she captures an essential part of growing up: the fear that you and you alone are strange. My daughters read her books again and again, sometimes finishing and then flipping right back to the first page. We have multiple copies of most of them, now completely tattered. Their intense love of these titles reminds me of a powerful aspect of reading—one that adults often end up forgetting.
First, here are four stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- Six books about winter as it once was
- A review of Adelle Waldman’s latest, a big-box-store allegory
- Five books in which romance sneaks up on you
- Poem: “Happiness,” by Mamie Morgan
Many of us read solely to be exposed to newness. Even on the rare occasions when I revisit books these days, it’s to find novel aspects of texts I first read when I was young. But for my children, Telgemeier’s books were special because they became so familiar. They clutched them like comfort objects. They didn’t so much read Smile as return to its bubbly lines and difficult emotions to feel a sense of relief in a story they already knew.
Books are comforting, maybe especially when you’re growing up, because reading a story that has a main character you can identify with, and—crucially—an ending you already know, is cathartic. In Smile, Raina smashes her front teeth when she trips while running, and the book is a catalog of her pain and humiliation. But she’s okay in the end. Why would my girls want to go over this repeatedly, besides the very inviting drawing style? Probably for the same reason that Raina’s fans gave Kisner in the profile. “What did it feel like when you read Guts for the first time?” Kisner asks 8-year-old Cassie. “Like I finally fitted in,” Cassie replies. “Like there was someone else in the world who felt like me.”
My daughters are now more teen than preteen, and it’s been a year or two since they picked up one of Telgemeier’s books. At the end of the article, Kisner describes Telgemeier’s desire now to write for an older audience, despite her publisher’s unease with the idea. “I feel like I want to spread my wings in different directions, but I’ve sort of created a box for myself,” Telgemeier says. “The industry, the market, whatever—they’re really good with where I am. I’m trying to push; I’m trying to expand … But it’s been tricky to land on just the right thing.” She recently shelved a new book that would have been much darker than her previous titles, exploring, as Kisner puts it, how “the world can be truly awful and … art can be a meaningful intervention in that awfulness.” When I canvassed my 14- and 11-year-old about whether they would be happy to read such a book, they couldn’t say yes fast enough. The kind of comfort they now need may have changed—they know a lot more—but they still understand that a book by Raina could make them feel okay about it all.
‘The Magic of Raina Is Real’
What to Read
NW, by Zadie Smith
Smith is from northwest London, which is the setting for her breakout first novel, White Teeth. In her fourth book, NW, published 12 years later, she returns to her old stomping grounds. The book tracks four friends, all trying to gain distance—geographical and metaphysical—from the housing project where they grew up. The friends’ paths diverge and converge, in a gritty urban landscape evoked by Smith’s fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration: “Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock.” Meanwhile, the overlapping stories reveal the way that identity markers (race, class, gender) interact with our desires as we try to build our adult lives. Smith once said that, as a child, she thought her Willesden neighborhood was the center of London and that Oxford Street was the suburbs. This feeling—that one corner of a city can be both the center of the world and a world unto itself—is made real in NW, as much as London is made real by a writer who knows the place deep in her bones. — Pamela Newton
From our list: Eight novels that truly capture city life
Out Next Week
📚 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, by Eric Klinenberg
📚 I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante
📚 A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, by Lauren Markham
Your Weekend Read
![A photograph of Michael R. Jackson](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/FTtr0Cn3pWhOvDFEaSBP_AKrcas=/media/img/posts/2024/02/unnamed/original.png)
How a Playwright Became One of the Most Incisive Social Critics of Our Time
Jackson believes that social media, a gathering threat for many years, tore open our collective reality in 2020; it created “an alternate universe” in which identity-based suffering—or merely the claim to such, however implausible or vicarious—could be converted into social capital. “In the theater world in particular,” he said, “things got instantaneously even more dramatic because suddenly you had all these artists out of work. And all they had is the internet to do the most Shakespearean of performances about George Floyd and everything else. The number of people in the theater world who used George Floyd’s dead body to pivot to inequity in the theater world is the most hair-raising thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
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