Review by Woodrow Phoenix
“This year I got a cruddy deal on all my teachers AND the most scrubly of lunchtimes: third. By third lunch the decent food’s mostly gone and there’s spills galore on all tables, chairs and the floor. For homeroom I got Mr Patzmann. Crew cut. His motto: ‘Good God people! Take a look at you! If this was the army, we’d lose the war!’ First period: Miss Fortner. History. Looks like she has an eternal headache, has on an ugly wig. Her motto: ‘If you want to be a clown, join the circus’. Second period: Mr Deangle. Biology. Nickname: ‘Gomez.’ Has face and voice of a monster movie. His motto: ‘What a good-looking class!’ Third period: Mr Sargus. Music. Spits when he talks and underarm odor and alcohol odor. His motto: ‘What do you say we just take it easy today and get started tomorrow?’”
My Perfect Life collects weekly comic strips by Lynda Barry originally serialized as Ernie Pook’s Comeek in the Chicago Reader and other alternative weekly newspapers published across the USA between 1988–1990. It follows on from the previous collection Come Over Come Over, continuing the focus on teenager Maybonne of the Mullen family.
After some major family issues between their mother and their mostly-absent father, Maybonne and her younger sister Marlys have been transplanted south from a big city to live with their grandmother in a small town. This means new schools, new friends and new kinds of stressful situations from those things. The first strip ‘This Year’ tells us exactly what to expect, featuring Maybonne’s assessment of the seven teachers who are going to dominate her new year of High School. It’s a horror parade of oddballs, particularly Mrs Jarnette the PE teacher who is “into ‘making you feel embarrassed’. Her nickname: The hairy eyeball. Her motto: ‘And now a Show of Hands from those who have yet to begin their menses?’” Maybonne also gets assigned a ‘locker partner’: “a girl called Corinna Morton who is new this year. She has slightly a ‘hee haw’ accent and she has said ‘you all’ to me. I am trying not to be shallow about her defects because I know the experience of being hard up for friends from last year when I first came here, but I am trying to find someone to trade partners with. So far no one will. Sometimes I wonder: is there a curse on my life?”
Lynda Barry’s pitch-perfect recreation of the life of a high-schooler in 1970s USA continues to deliver on every level, hitting each note on the emotional strings of adolescence from the elation of first romances to the bleakest existential despair of betrayals, exploitation and abuse with nobody to intercede and nowhere to run to. Despite those lows, this is a positive, life-affirming read.
Concluding a year of hilarious and heartbreaking incident, Maybonne’s ready for a new term as she writes what we gradually realise to be a prayer: “Please let this year‘s school be good. Let me get decent teachers, have people I like to sit with at lunch and keep me away from Doug. Let me do good at all my subjects. Keep my hair, clothes, and body from looking warped and make it so people don’t think I’m weird. … Truly I also thank you for last year. It was incredible even though parts did make me about barf from sadness, I still say right on! I can’t believe it finally is the first day of school!”
Drawn and Quarterly’s reprint edition of My Perfect Life won an Eisner Award for ‘Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips’ in 2023.
