I’ve been reading Lynda Barry for decades, years before I considered writing a potential career. I have pushed her novel, Cruddy (1999), into dozens of readers’ hands. The Fun House (1988), The Good Times Are Killing Me (1988), The! Greatest! of! Marlys! (2000), and One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) give me pure joy. When reading Barry’s work, I have permission to use all the exclamation points that were beaten out of me in grade school.
Lynda Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956 and raised in Seattle. While studying fine arts at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, after a breakup she began drawing comic strips, which appeared in student publications at Evergreen State and the University of Washington, published by the editors Matt Groening and John Keister. The early days of Ernie Pook’s Comeek chronicled the everyday life of a boy named Ernie Pook and soon featured Freddy and the irrepressible Marlys. Ernie Pook’s Comeek was picked up by the Chicago Reader when Barry was twenty-three and appeared in more than seventy alternative weeklies for two decades.
It is my goal to be a Barry completist, and I’m grateful that so many of her books are still in print. She is also the author of Come Over, Come Over (1990), My Perfect Life (1992), and The Freddie Stories (1999) and has written four bestselling how-to graphic novels. What It Is (2008) won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel. It was followed by Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (2010), Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014), and Making Comics (2019), which received two Eisner Awards. Her books on the creative life encourage us to regain the sense of play we lost before we remember losing it. They’ve provided me with a newfound appreciation for her work and insight into my own.
I was thrilled and delighted to interview Barry. I was also nervous. Meeting one’s heroes is fraught, but I remain thrilled and delighted. We spoke via Zoom in a chaotically animated conversation on December 16, 2024, that has been compressed and edited for something approximating clarity.
Barry joins the Zoom late, eating from a plate of toast and apologizing profusely. She’s at her desk in her home in Wisconsin, her hair in braids. It is exactly as I’d pictured it.
Lynda Barry: My students would be delighted because I am wildly punctual—they would think this was hilarious. I’m mortified, but it’s a good way to start an interview, being completely mortified.
Mary Miller: I’ve been so nervous because I’m such a huge fan. I can’t believe I’m talking to you right now.
LB: I just need to put this in the microwave . . . [Barry sets her plate of toast in the microwave.] As you can see, there’s nothing to be worried about—I’m out of my mind.
MM: I found your novel Cruddy decades ago. I can open it up to any page and be immersed all over again in the world of Roberta and Julie, their beautiful terrible mother, the Turtle, Vicky Talluso. Cruddy is unique in that it’s your only novel-length work; it’s also my favorite, so it’s where I want to begin. What was the process of writing it like?
LB: I had this image of a glow-in-the-dark Jesus on a blue-mirrored cross that I couldn’t get out of my head. We had one like it when I was growing up—Jesus was on his cross in every room of our house—so there was the crucifix and the house and then I saw the street and the lumberyard forming around it. Computers were beginning to be ubiquitous at the time and I was working consistently, but I’d go through what I’d written and start deleting stuff even though there wasn’t anything wrong with what I’d written. That’s when I started using a paintbrush.
I finished it in nine months, and it was a completely different story than I’d planned. I thought it would be an uplifting social commentary. Instead, there was all this horror, gore, and murder everywhere, but I loved it so much. I had so much fun. And when it ended, it ended. I remember I was vacuuming one day, and I ran upstairs to write the last little bit, and then it was gone. I never saw any of those characters again.
MM: I love it when that happens because if readers don’t like the ending, it’s like, Oh, well. You can’t continue it even if you want to.
LB: It was the strangest experience because my previous book, The Good Times Are Killing Me, became a play that I worked on for years. I got to see the characters played by different people in different places. I saw it move through time. And with Cruddy I kept thinking, If I just keep showing up, they’ll return, but they never did.
MM: Completing a novel with a paintbrush in nine months is an incredible feat. I have no idea how this would work.
LB: It is arguably a very slow way to write a book. But it turns out that three thousand years of Chinese history isn’t wrong—people have been writing with a paintbrush for forever. It’s so slow, you enter a meditative state. I had been desperate to try and figure out why I couldn’t write this book on the computer, but then I thought back to grade school and how I would have never dreamed of writing a book without having the actual book first. I needed to see it, hold it in my hands. So that’s what I did. I used construction paper and made fifteen or twenty of these little booklets, which worked well except that I could only get a few bits on each page. Also, it would it be wet, so I had to get out the hair dryer. I switched to a legal pad at some point and would just tear off a page when I was finished and lay it out flat.
I’ve been working on another novel and trying various tricks, but it won’t come. I don’t yet know which keyhole it’s going to come through yet.
MM: I love that—“which keyhole it’s going to come through.”
My handwriting looks like a four-year-old’s. And I write so slowly and scratch everything out and critique myself too much when I’m writing by hand because I have time to second-guess myself. I wish I had more patience and could train my brain and body to work together like you’re describing.
LB: Well, I can tell you it led to the way that I teach. One of the things I love showing my students is that writing by hand is so much faster than writing with a computer because the back of the mind and the top of the mind and the hand are all working together. I show my students that if they can write delightful and unexpected stories in seven minutes, they can also write papers for school if they do it by hand first. Until you experience it, it’s hard to believe. But I’ve been doing it long enough to see it work and to find the joy in creating this way. It’s like being on a road trip. You think you’re just going to this one site, but then you turn down a detour and there’s a giant rabbit. Actually, that did happen to me once. And that’s the stuff I’m really interested in. The computer is good for some stuff, but for me it’s slower and it encourages you to delete things that you don’t necessarily understand yet.
MM: This makes perfect sense. I never delete stuff, though—I have so many trash files. If something is terrible, I just move into one of my many trash files; sometimes I never go back to it and other times I continue to think about it and turn it into not-trash.
Last week when I was cleaning out my old bedroom—my parents have lived in the same house since I was nine months old—I found a journal that I’d kept in my senior year of high school. I haven’t had the guts to open it yet, but whenever I look back at one of my sporadic journals, I remember each sentence; it’s like the physical act of writing imprints on your brain in a way that the keyboard can’t touch. The older you get, the more there is to forget, but you can help yourself decide what to remember by writing it down. It’s easy to rewrite your life in this way, too, to fictionalize it to the point you can’t remember what’s real.
You must have a massive amount of physical material. I’m curious if your archives have been purchased.
LB: Everything will go to [the] University of Wisconsin. That’s already been arranged, and I’ve started to move some stuff. I’m delighted that somebody wants to keep all of it. There’s a lot—lots and lots.
I have so much that isn’t even mine. I have one of my student’s composition notebooks here; it’s just a regular composition notebook. This was a person who wasn’t drawing at all when I met her. In one of the exercises I assigned, the students were asked to think of a photo of themselves from when they were younger, one they could draw from memory. So here she is standing on the back of the couch, barefoot in a dress. And then I had them draw themselves in the same place doing the same thing, but how they look in the present day. They wrote a story in the first-person present tense from the day the original photo was taken and another from the perspective of their current self looking back on the scene. The idea is that drawing can help you write, and writing can help you draw, and you figure out things that you missed the first time around.
I have hundreds and hundreds of notebooks. I started doing this when I was nineteen. I had this great teacher, Marilyn Frasca, who taught me about writing and drawing by hand, and I put everything in here; so much of what I record is mundane: The garden hose is tangled, and I need to untangle it; will I ever vacuum again? I don’t know.
MM: Matt Groening ran the college magazine when y’all were at Evergreen State together. I read that he published everything that was submitted to him. Is this true, or is it an exaggeration?
LB: Oh, it’s true. I kept trying to come up with the worst stuff—stuff he absolutely would not print—and he printed everything. Everything. We now look at each other’s lives with a kind of horror.
MM: One of the reasons I’ve always loved your work is that we were raised in similar environments, and I could see myself represented in a way I hadn’t before. We’re both Catholic and grew up with music, but few books. There was the newspaper in your household, some encyclopedias. But you also had fairy tales. Do you remember when Grimms’ Fairy Tales entered your life?
LB: I know exactly when and how it happened; they were given away for free if you spent so much money at this store. It was a summer promotion, and they mostly gave away encyclopedias—we had six or seven of them—but one year they were giving away children’s books: Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Arabian Nights. I begged my mother for them. My mother had a lot of mental problems and was not a very good mom, but she got them for me. She was so much like the witches in the fairy tales that it almost gave me sanity to read them. She always hated it when I was reading. If I was reading, to her it looked like I was just sitting there holding a pineapple. She thought I should be cleaning. When she went into hospice two summers ago and I went back to Seattle to care for her, it was the same thing. If I was doing anything but cleaning or paying attention to her, she would lose it.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales saved my ass. It saved me because I knew that these people did exist, and they caused real harm. That’s why the evil stepmother is such a handy trope. In a fairy tale, the real mom is dead—the good mother’s dead, the bad mom’s here—so that way you can both love and hate your mother. Fairy tales allow us to sit with these opposing feelings, and both are important.
My mom skipped my high school graduation, didn’t come to my college graduation. She didn’t want me to go to college at all, was furious about it. She was also incredibly beautiful.
MM: Just like the mother in Cruddy. She’s a knockout, but I always forget because she’s so awful.
LB: My mother didn’t want to be seen with me. It’s nuts that only a fairy tale can save you. But I had good teachers, and I loved school. Oh my God, I loved school so much and I loved the library.
MM: In my teen years, I found Stephen King. I would read these fat novels alone in my room at night and terrify myself.
I was starting to become a reader, but I wasn’t a good student. I recently found my report cards from elementary school, and they were not great. Even my penmanship grade was mediocre. I tend to forget how indifferent of a student I was because this shifted in tenth grade when I had a history teacher who encouraged me. Now I have two master’s degrees and would stay in school forever if I could.
LB: I love that you love Stephen King. I wrote this comic called “When Heidi Met Carrie,” because they were my heroes. Carrie shows up covered in blood and Heidi cleans her up and introduces her to her goats. And Heidi’s like Yeah, you killed your mom, but she started it!
When I got to college, I didn’t tell anyone that I dug Stephen King. It’s like I got bullied out of all the stuff I loved, just for a couple of years, but it happened—I bullied myself; it was me doing it. I felt like such a half person compared to people who had gone to really good schools and had books in their house.
MM: Your mother’s side of the family is Filipino while mine is Lebanese, and our fathers are white, but we were raised primarily with our mother’s families.
LB: Oh, this is interesting! Did you have Lebanese people coming over and staying with you guys?
MM: They were all here by the time I came along. My great-grandfather arrived at Ellis Island as a teenager and his mother was killed on the railroad tracks pretty much immediately, which is like some sort of sick joke. After that he wound up in Mississippi because a cousin offered him a job. I can’t remember when my great-grandmother immigrated, but it was around the same time, and any relatives we have in Lebanon are super distant now.
LB: Filipinos immigrated like crazy. Our house was always full of people who were just arriving. When my mom married my dad, she went to live with my white grandma, who was furious because [my mom] was brown and didn’t speak English. In the town that they were living in, there were sunset laws, and my mom had the most miserable, miserable time. She would practice English just so she could tell my grandmother off.
MM: That’s a good incentive to learn the language! I found myself researching sunset towns not long ago and was shocked that places out west have so many, like Oregon. Illinois has the most—I swear, every one of its towns seems to have been a sunset town. Do you have relatives still coming over?
LB: My mom died two summers ago, and everybody’s gone, but back then all the families lived together. When I got to grade school and started reading, there was this primer called On Cherry Street, and I would look at the pictures and think, Who are these people? Why do they look like that? Two kids and two parents and the kids each have their own bedroom. Meanwhile, my brothers and cousins and everybody were all piled on top of each other.
MM: How many siblings do you have?
LB: Two brothers.
MM: So you don’t have sisters? But you write so well about sisters! Edna and Lucy from The Good Times Are Killing Me and Roberta and Julie in Cruddy. These relationships are as vivid to me as my own. My sister is four years younger than I am, and we were so weirdly close that we slept in the same bed until I was sixteen and pushed her out one night on a whim. There’s still fallout after all these years. I have brothers, but they aren’t nearly as interesting to me as my sister.
LB: I call my work autobifictionalography—it’s like a Venn diagram of imagination and autobiography. Edna’s story is set on the street where I grew up and Roberta’s house is two blocks down the hill. I need a real place so I can visualize where they’re going and what they’re doing, and the story flows out of that. It’s half dream, half reality; it’s you, but it’s not you.
MM: This is how I feel about my stories as well, though I’ve never had a good word for it.
Most of my undergraduates are first-generation students who live in small Mississippi towns, and they find [their towns] so boring, and I spend a lot of time trying to show them that these places are interesting!
Pontotoc, Mississippi, for example, has an Amish community, which may not be unique in Pennsylvania, but in the Deep South it’s extremely rare. You see the Amish driving their buggies to Walmart. My husband, who’s a lawyer, once mediated a buggy–car accident and the Amish guy didn’t have a phone, so [the guy] had to go over to his neighbor’s house that he’d been in the accident with to call his lawyer; then they drove together to the courthouse. In the same town, there’s this guy who bikes around with a Chucky doll strapped to his handlebars. This is thrilling stuff! I want my students to write about the old guys chatting in front of the gas station and the deliciousness of gas station food.
LB: Oh, I remember gas station food! I am totally going to have my students write a seven-minute story about gas station food.
MM: That reminds me that my dad used to take me fishing when I was small, and it was so awful—you’re just sitting there holding a pole and nothing’s happening while the people next to you are reeling them in like crazy, so he’d have to bribe me with a sack full of candy from the gas station afterward. I was a very food-motivated child, and this worked on me for years. In rural towns, gas stations are important places; they may be all you have outside of the churches.
LB: That’s what happens when people start writing about their childhoods: memories spark other memories. If I tell you to visualize your elementary school cafeteria, it leads you down the hallway to the music room, into the bathroom—you could write about this stuff for ages. Writing about childhood wakes you up. When you think about fishing with your dad, you’re creating an entire narrative around it. You’re thinking about what time of day it was and the season, the anticipation of the candy . . . I bet he brings a particular thermos with him, and what’s in it? There’s so much there.
MM: When my dad goes fishing or hunting, he’s up at three or four in the morning and there are these special clothes to put on and a long drive. The whole process to me is excruciating, but that’s what he seems to like about it. Thank God I had brothers so my mom and sister and I could sleep in late and eat sushi for lunch, maybe go to the movies.
LB: I love Mississippi. There’s just something about being down there that makes me feel well. I wanted to live there for a long time. It was a plan of mine until I married Kevin; he does prairie restoration and natural habitat restoration, and his expertise is on a very small area of oak savannas, which we live in right now. And then I got my job at the university and was like, I’m never gonna live in Mississippi, I guess.
MM: I have never heard anyone say this before. What do you like about Mississippi?
LB: It’s everything: the music, the food, the way people speak, the way they tell stories, kudzu. When I was in my twenties, I’d just get in the car and drive down there looking for good food and folk art and interesting stories. I remember going into a store, and as I was leaving, somebody said, “Come back,” so I turned around and went back because I didn’t realize that was how you could say goodbye.
I also spent a lot of time in Louisiana visiting with musicians and making paintings. I’d meet someone and end up at their house listening to them play music. For two years I was down there quite a lot. I would have these dreams where I was jumping out of a plane, opening my parachute over a map of the United States, and I’d kick my legs so hard to get down there. My friend calls me a grits chaser.
When you said that thing about good gas station food, I almost started crying. It’s been sad to leave the South behind. Here everything is straight. The walls are straight. The sidewalks are straight. Everything is straight.
MM: I nearly died in a pothole when I visited my parents in Jackson last week. I thought I’d lost my whole car, and I screamed so loud. Yazoo clay, they call it. The streets are broken up and they pave them and it rains and then they’re all broken up again. Nothing is ever straight here.
I want to go back to something you said about The Good Times Are Killing Me, how it lived on after it was published. It was made into an Off-Broadway play, but it was in Chicago first. How did all of that happen? One of the things I love about writing and publishing is that things snowball in unexpected ways.
LB: There was this great theater group that put it on in Chicago, and it wasn’t an adaptation but a straight retelling of the story, like if a character says something in the book, the actors spoke it verbatim, which was an unusual way to stage a play. It did well there, and then these two people from New York saw it and asked if I wanted to do a more traditional adaptation. I was part of all of it—choosing the actors and the director, who was brilliant. And I was completely ignorant of how rare and astonishing this offer was. I was like, Okay, that sounds good, I’ll move to New York. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know anything about theater whatsoever.
It was an amazing experience. But there are so many people involved when you’re doing something like that; it’s the same with animation. I’m good friends with Matt Groening, and he’s great at working with lots of people. As much as I loved working on that play, I knew it was a singular experience that wouldn’t happen again.
MM: When I was at the Michener Center at the University of Texas, my secondary genre was playwriting. I wasn’t good at the actual writing of plays, but I enjoyed seeing how it all worked: reading stage directions for my friends at their table reads, watching plays in makeshift theaters, observing the collaborative aspect of it.
LB: It’s one of our oldest art forms, and something that kids do from the youngest age. At the university there are four preschools on campus, and there’s one that’s become my favorite. I go there during the school year once a week and three times a week during the summer to work with four-year-olds. All I do is hang out with these kids and draw and write down their stories if they have something they want me to write. They get deep into drama. If they’re making pancakes, they enact every step—breaking the eggs, stirring the batter—and they don’t talk much while they’re doing it. Adults don’t really understand this when they hang out with kids. You don’t say, “Oh, are you making pancakes? Is that an egg?” Can you imagine being with a friend who says in a sing-songy voice, “Are you drinking your coffee now? Is it yummy?”
I love being with them, period, but I’m also interested in what makes drawing and writing split because at their age these things are still working together. They draw their name; it’s not writing yet. I’m interested in how they separate, and whether we can keep them together for a little while longer.
MM: This is fascinating. I have a niece, Varley, who’s nearly three. When we’re together, we’re building and creating worlds, sword fighting, hunting for buried treasure. But we’re also making pancakes, sweeping leaves. She made a house out of a box, and it got all grubby and bombed out, but she panicked when my sister tried to throw it out. Now she has a whole tent that’s set up in middle of their living room, her house inside of a house.
In interviews you’ve discussed pairing four-year-olds with your graduate students. How do they interact? What does it look like when they’re together?
LB: My graduate students are often miserable, and I started to wonder what was going on. Like, why is this acceptable to the university? And I realized that graduate students, particularly PhD students, start to lose their peripheral vision of the rest of the world; the world becomes smaller and smaller until their two states of being are working on their dissertation and not working on their dissertation.
When I’ve been in a creative jam, the four-year-olds bring me out of it, so I told my graduate students that they were going to meet with co-researchers who would work with them on their dissertations once a week for two hours. I didn’t tell them any more than that. And it worked well because they learned this other state of being. It opened them up.
I’m hooked on the kids. I go for no other reason than it makes me feel really good. It’s like when people talk about yoga or some other activity that brings them pure joy, like your dad with his fishing.
MM: I wish I could meet with these four-year-olds and learn to love art again. I was always humiliated in art class in high school because I knew I wasn’t any good, so I stopped trying. I remember this one time I actually put effort into it. I made this enormous chalk piece for an auction—we each had to contribute one piece and price them ourselves. A former teacher asked to buy mine, but I never priced it because it made me so uncomfortable. How could I price something that’s worthless? I would have given it away for free, but that somehow seemed even more humiliating, so I just avoided him for the rest of my life. When I passed him in the hall, I looked the other way.
LB: That’s fascinating. This physical object was given so much power that it steered your life away from this person.
What I love about making comics is that there’s a real difference between comics and representational drawing. Think about Charlie Brown: you would not want a hyperrealistic image of Charlie Brown with human hands and a nose. It would be horrifying. Comics have different signatures in the brain, and the people that I love working with the most, with all my heart, are those who gave up on drawing at about eight when they realized they couldn’t draw hands and noses. I seek these people out. I’m just like, Yeah, come to me. Because their drawing style is still intact from that time. It hasn’t been messed with; it’s been in the closet.
In my classes, we never talk about “the work.” We never hold anything up for discussion. I recently had this student who was convinced his drawing was terrible, and I got to work with him for two semesters. His final was this gorgeous thirty-two-page zine that has the most original line—you would never guess that he had any trouble or that he had a complicated relationship with the form, but you also wouldn’t think this was a representational artist.
One of the best things you can do is draw with your eyes closed. Draw with your eyes closed for one minute and when you open them up, you’ll laugh.
MM: I was just looking at one of your student’s closed-eye drawing of a breakfast platter, thinking, I could do that! I could draw silly pancakes and bacon and laugh if I closed my eyes.
Your professor in college, Marilyn Frasca, required her class to produce ten paintings a week, and I do something similar with my writing students—requiring them to produce many shorter works in a brief amount of time. That way they don’t have time to overthink things or edit the heart out of it. It also helps them to view their writing as less precious.
LB: Exactly. You get to the point where you have so many drawings that the question of whether one is fantastic or terrible disappears; it’s just pen on paper. I often talk about the blanky, which is a baby’s first artwork. Nobody teaches a baby how to comfort themself with this piece of cloth, to make it a transitional item; the kid figures out how to transform this thing into something that comforts them. They have this whole relationship that everyone recognizes.
So, Miss Varley’s dancing, she’s singing, she’s making marks, she’s doing everything that we call the arts. Sculpture, drama, dance. And if she was scared to do any of these things, you’d be worried about her, right? You’d be worried and heartbroken. I want to walk these things back into people’s lives, not necessarily as a way for them to make a living or identify as an artist or whatever, but to give them the feeling that life is worth living. That’s what I’m working on right now, the stuff I’m thinking about the most. 
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are all very much alike. She is the author of Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, The Freddie Stories, The Good Times Are Killing Me, which was adapted as an Off-Broadway play, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Making Comics, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, One! Hundred! Demons!, Picture This, and What It Is. Her acclaimed how-to graphic novels Making Comics and What It Is both received Eisner Awards. In 2019 she received a MacArthur genius grant. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is an associate professor of art and a Discovery Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Mary Miller is the author of four books, most recently the novel Biloxi. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and American Short Fiction, among others.
Illustration: Simon Jane Robrock
