Here Barry allows speech balloons to fill in the gaps to which she alludes in her main text, with heart-wrenching effect. 'Resilience' explores the mistaken belief of some adults that young children who have experienced a trauma will somehow forget and move past it. Then a casually cruel comment from an admired neighbor made her self-conscious enough to stop. In 'Dancing,' she explains that almost everyone in her family danced with great pleasure. The author's keen observation and honesty draw readers to these sometimes painful, often poignant moments. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īdult/High School-Barry uses an Asian painting exercise called 'One Hundred Demons' to organize and connect 17 'autobifictionalographic' stories in which she meditates on a variety of demons that include pretentious boyfriends, lost childhood friends, family relationships, and even the 2000 presidential election. In the book’s intro, however, Barry throws the idea of truth out of the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins “ autobiofictionalography.” As readers get to know Barry’s demons, they realize that the actual truth no longer matters because the universality of Barry’s comics, true or untrue, reigns supreme.

In Barry’s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend kickball games on a warm summer night watching your baby brother dance the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager.Īs a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One! Hundred! Demons! an enduring classic of the early twenty-first century. Inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk’s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes.

“You’ll wonder how anything can be so sad and so funny at the same time.” ―Lev Grossman, Time

One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry