From the acclaimed author of Ephemera: A Memoir, Briana Loewinsohn, comes a brand new coming-of-age biography, based on Loewinsohn’s experience of high school: Raised by Ghosts. Also published by Fantagraphics, this is a potent trip back to the 1990s, shifting between real-life class notes, diary entries, as well as illustrated cartoon panels. This is a poignant graphic memoir, reflecting on taking chances, friendship and growing up.
The endpapers of Raised by Ghosts are an immediate nostalgia trip for anyone who grew up in the late Nineties, with a collage of postcards, bookmarks and pins attached to a board, including a wrapper for a cherry cola, a programme for a high school play, 3D glasses and a note on lined paper, a symbol which will be present throughout the graphic memoir.
Drawn in a rustic, homely style, readers are initially transported to Briana’s middle school years between 1991-1994. Briana is alone, but clearly content, skipping along the pavement and admiring the rogue dandelion that pops up from the stone walkway. She’s entirely in her own bubble, until a group of boys heckle and mock her. Despite her initial happy go lucky appearance, this isn’t her first experience of feeling isolated and self-conscious. There is a definite disconnect between how she appears on the outside, and how she feels on the inside. Her first diary entry illuminates further how secluded she feels from her peers: “They all understand how to be in the world in a way that I do not”.
Sadly, Briana’s feeling of isolation also applies to her home-life. Her parents are divorced, and largely absent – only represented by speech bubbles coming from the other side of a door: “it’s as if I am a ghost in my house”. Whilst the title implies that Briana’s parents are ghosts, Briana is also figuratively a ghost, drifting and dancing around the empty house and being unseen and looked through in both her home and school life. As Briana enters high school, she begins to find her footing with others who also feel alien and out of place. But friendships soon begin to falter, and life at home is as lonely as ever, as Briana’s sense of self-worth wavers.
I love the way that Loewinsohn draws subtle details, like Briana’s hair tendrils twirling in the wind, or how the background chatter of other characters is represented by rare “yaddas” and “blahs” amongst a plethora of small lines in a speech bubble. Another easily overlooked detail, is the representation of sounds, with onomatopoeic “creaks” and “rings” in more colourful capital letters, compared to the neutral, subdued text.
The panels have an almost coffee-stained, dark effect, as if well-thumbed and weathered from the time that has passed between Briana’s past, and the present in which we are now reading. It’s unusual to have prose mixed in with cartoon panels, but the frequent changes between the illustrations and the litter of real-life notes added a nice element of authenticity to the narrative, reminding the reader of Loewinsohn’s mirroring of herself in Briana’s character. Briana feels so real and relatable because she is real, and so are all of the notes scattered throughout, passed back and forth a classroom or scribbled in a diary. By using these materials, Loewinsohn is finally able to give teenage Briana the voice and presence she so craved.
Both sweet and melancholy, Raised by Ghosts is a love letter from Loewinsohn to her younger self, and also to lost souls, who are waiting to be seen.
Briana Loewinsohn (W/A) • Fantagraphics, $18.99.
Review by Lydia Turner
