Handbook by Kevin Budnik

I picked up Handbook by Kevin Budnik at this year's independent bookstore day in Chicago. It is a graphic memoir about the author's experiences in therapy for anxiety and disordered eating, as well as his life after recovery.

I was drawn to the book's illustration style of and neat square format. What spoke to me was the simplicity that runs throughout the pages, from hand lettering and seeing blue lines of sketches beneath final images to the right amount of detail in each panel.

Despite the fact that Kevin let us into his head and talks about heavy topics like mental health issues, and you can definitely feel his anxiety, there is some strange lightness in the way the memoir was written. The book does not feel like a linear story, which is a good thing. Instead, there are snippets of conversations or recollections of stories. A one-page story may or may not be continued on the following page, which is what I liked about the style, playing with the format of a graphic memoir. At times, I had the impression feeling that I was reading John Porcellino.

Reading the memoir made me reconsider the format I want to use for my own memoir, specifically making it non-chronological and less structured. Certainly, such a strategy appears to be far more manageable and less intimidating.