From her tangle of memories, a central plot emerges. The postal service played a huge part in the 90s underground comics world. During theheyday, Julie becomes pen pals with a young French soldier called the Hussar, and their overseas correspondence quickly turns romantic. When Julie visits Paris the two meet, and fall into a months-long grappling between lust and violence, romance and obsession. She never draws a human version of the Hussar.
In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Julie and the Hussar sneak into Père Lachaise Cemetery after hours and cut themselves with a razor blade. But Julie cuts too deeply into her arm by accident. Instead of drawing the actual scene, she draws a flurry of bugs, fish, crabs, and disconnected faces. The only visual tie to the narrative is a single razor blade, drawn to span the split between two pages.
At the apex of this anecdote, Julie interrupts herself. “While we were at it we made a blood pact, right in the AIDS epidemic,” she writes. “Super good idea!” This interjection gets to the heart of the book. Middle-aged Julie tries desperately to make sense of her past decisions, judging her younger self, jostled at all sides by the flurry of her past. Some of her recollections are muddy. Some are overtly omitted.
The book’s one misstep comes in its reading directives. Pages are meant to be read from top to bottom, but even in following these directions, the speech bubbles become convoluted. Maybe the disordered text was meant to enhance the confusion of the narrative, but in action, it feels annoying. You’re often scrambling to find your place on the page. It’s a real barrier to entry—one that is well worth surpassing, but could have been avoided in the first place.Memories can grow claustrophobic.
The book’s end pages show a stark line of dots in a row. They feel like ellipses bookending the story—and connectingto the rest of Doucet’s career. It’s an exciting promise: not just an opportunity to appreciate what came before, but to anticipate what she still has to tell us.
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