Part 3 - 2010 - Oblivion
1. Could you tell me a little bit about your background as an artist/illustrator?
I grew up drawing. My art was probably the number one thing that defined me all the way through my teens. I lived in Seattle with my mom until I was thirteen, and then when she divorced my step-dad, we moved to Missoula, Montana for high school. I was sort of goth and passionate about music, clothes, and style. My mother is a graphic designer and I used to hand draw greeting cards and her colleagues and clients would buy them. People around her office would commission me to draw things, like portraits of other people in the office.
After high school, I moved to New York in 2003 to study interior design at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), but I dropped out after one semester. The work was so technical—drafting and rendering—that it sort of wrecked me creatively and I lost the ability to draw from my imagination or without an assignment. I was living on loans in New York, so I felt stifled creatively but also terrified about how I was going to afford food and rent and tuition and scared about the debt I was getting into.
Looking back, it was the right move. I knew what I had to do, which was just start working and earning money. I’ve been a personal assistant, worked in retail, nannied—you name it—all of which turned me into a “get-things-done” kind of person, which I’ve learned is more rare than you might think. I’ve worked full-time in creative fields (mainly in New York City, but also Chicago) since I was 18. I’ve worked in publishing (Feminist Press and Dottir Press), produced a nationwide tour of the play Slut, with an interior design firm, had my own organizing business (Niceland) and I now work for the fashion designer Rachel Comey, but I haven’t kept up with practicing fine art. It’s very hard to find the time (or motivation) for drawing, which is done by hand and requires so much precision. Illustrating your book, in fact, was quite challenging for me after so many years being out of practice.
2. Is this the first novel you’ve illustrated? I’d love to hear a bit about your process when designing the images for a book.
This is the first novel I’ve illustrated, but all through high school and beyond, random businesses would ask me to illustrate logos and other projects. My process for your book was complex, but also appropriate to the task, which was to create really personal imagery for a very personal narrative.
Since I was so rusty, I used Youtube to retrain myself on perspective drawing (I had to relearn the various point perspectives, which is very technical but if you don’t get it right, the drawing looks amateurish). My boyfriend encouraged me to make the drawings more loose and freehand, but I couldn’t go with it—I needed to use a ruler and deploy exacting technique. My natural inclinations are part of the reason I don’t draw very often—I’m a perfectionist and take it all very seriously, to the point where illustrating is stressful and almost traumatizing.
My process for the room scenes was to set up still-lifes in my apartment or my boyfriend’s apartment—I’d set a bunch of toiletries on a table, or pack up a duffle bag and place it on the floor and then look at it and photograph it from different angles. The breakfast scene and the chapter 1 drawing of the shoes by the front door were based on photos I took at my old roommate’s apartment, after he had a surprise mid-life baby. For chapter 4, I looked up photos taken by Norwegian people in ambulances, so that I could see what the doors and interiors looked like for Laura.
Part 4 - 2010 - Never Let Me Go
You also sent me many personal photos that I used for reference—like the hospital interiors and the actual leaflet from which you drew the title of the book. I bought a lightpad and a bunch of new drawing stuff like scale rulers and dozens of new .2 Micron pens to trace over my initial pencil drawings. I don’t create anything digitally, so every time I needed to change anything in a scene, I had to redraw the whole illustration. Each final drawing took over ten hours and between three and six inked iterations.
Part 5 - 2009 - One More Time With Feeling
3. Had you read the book before taking on this project? Did you have your own images of the characters and settings in your head? Which illustration was the first one that came to you?
Jennifer came to me with the idea to include illustrations in your book, so I read it in a couple days and took notes as I went on things that struck me visually. I had some very clear images in mind of certain settings and characters immediately. Others developed through the sketches and then sort of got stuck there and became hard to reimagine. For instance, if I fully imagined a room, it was hard to see it differently if you had feedback—not because I was resisting you, but because the room lived in my imagination now. Being a New Yorker, the first images that came to me were Laura’s experiences in the opening chapters as she is walking around the city, riding the train, and in her apartment. The first drawing I started was the living room in the house party scene in Brooklyn, where she first meets Nick. Brooklyn apartments inhabited by twenty-somethings in 2013 is a world I know well. I based the furnishings on my own living room at the time, but adapted the architecture to make it look closer to what you describe in the book.
Part 2 - 2013 - You Are Here
4. Related to that, I remember in your very first email to me, you asked me about the playlist I had made, since the chapters are named after different songs. Did you start by listening to the music? I’d love to hear more about what you “saw” when you listened to the music and read the novel.
I took notes on the song names during my first read so that I could listen to the music and get a sense of what type of person Laura was. Many of the songs and artists resonated with me, too, and really helped me paint a picture of Laura over the years, especially her formative years. The character’s taste aligning with mine was useful, too, because if she had been some sort of basic girl who liked mainstream music, I would not have been able to easily picture that person as a teenager or young adult. Using song titles as chapter headings was really smart, I think. It’s a detail that adds a lot of tone and mood. There were darker songs, more rebellious songs, more hopeful songs—and it correlated with what Laura was facing and the tone I would strike in that drawing.
5. I love how the illustrations leave lots of room for the viewer/reader to fill in their own images of Laura and the other characters, and yet show us some very specific things, such as the L-word on the screen of Laura’s laptop in the 2006 chapter, and the Solo bottle on the window sill (Norwegian soda). How did you settle on using still lives/ settings as the illustrations for this book?
Some chapters were easier for me to imagine as a whole scene. The 2006 chapter was extra packed with details I related to and were super fun to revisit. I have very fond memories watching The L Word on my laptop in bed in Williamsburg, hungover, lazy but so comfortable, with empty beverage containers and crap everywhere, and pictures of all my friends and idols around me. A girl’s bedroom is such a special, sacred place. That 2006 chapter is one of my favorite drawings, incidentally.
Part 6 - 2006 - Keep On Living
6. How do you think text and images enhance or are in conversation with each other?
My aesthetic style is very minimalist and clean, yet highly detailed, which has a sort of Nordic briskness and disdain for sloppy emotionality. At the same time, I torture myself with drawing—it’s painful, as opposed to something I do to chill out, almost tedious. I think that reality, whether or not the viewer/reader consciously gets it, supported the text—which was about a painful day-to-day that took tremendous effort to navigate and was deeply misunderstood by people who didn’t share the reality.
When I met you, finally, it was uncanny how physically similar we were in the sense of being small quiet people, who don’t take up space in all senses of that phrase. Jennifer laughed at our group photo, because she was almost a foot taller than the two of us, but it’s more than size that we share—it’s a sensitive way of being in the world, the opposite of the character Nick in the book, who is glibly healthy and too relaxed.
7. We worked with one drawing of a sink, based on a photo I sent you taken in a Norwegian hospital. It gave me chills when I saw your drawing. How did you decide which ones to use in the end?
Yes! I remember you loved the sink. The foreground of that image was a plate of hospital food. The art director and I had established that line drawings (no grayscale) were going to print better in the final book, but line-drawn food with no shading is hard to execute, so I had to abandon that whole drawing, even though you really liked it.
8. Could you give me a sentence or two about each of the final illustrations?
Chapter 1. I visited my friend Todd who has a two-year-old to check out their dining table and set up a breakfast still life with kids’ toys. For the spill I googled images of spills at all different angles. That’s my personal mug and old iPhone.
Part 1 - 2016 - Now My Heart Is Full
Chapter 2. After working in interior design it is hard not to be obsessive about getting the scale and perspective right for an apartment scene, so this one drove me crazy! My favorite elements are the more organic ones, like the plants and curvy chair. I snuck in a piece of art by my friend Nicole Skibola.
Chapter 3. This is my F train! It’s very triggering to look at since I’ve been away from New York City for the past six weeks due to the quarantine. I spent a disproportionately long time rendering this floor—there are thousands of little circles representing the cork-like floor of that particular train.
Chapter 4. The ambulance was one of the last drawings I did. It was so complicated, especially since I was referencing a handful of low res images. I invented and simplified much of the interior. For the legs and feet, I drew myself, even before I knew we were similar in size.
Chapter 5. The hospital room bedside table was based on your photos. This drawing was a nice respite from the more technical ones. I used hand cream and other items from around my house to create the still life.
Chapter 6. For this, I drew my computer in my bed. For the decor, I drew everything I thought my teenage self would have had (pictures from magazines, bands, and friends’ photos taped to the wall, christmas lights year round), while directly incorporating your references Le Tigre and Solo soda.
Chapter 7. I had a lot of ideas for this chapter but they were too abstract for me to get down on paper so I decided to show a selfie of Laura with her alternative beauty products. I looked at Parisian real estate to see examples of different sinks, to make sure the bathroom didn’t look too American, but in the end it just looks like any bathroom!
Part 7 - 2003 - I’m Gonna Love You Like I’m Indestructible
Chapter 8. My original drawings had an entire skating rink in the background but the whole thing was just too big so I had to zoom in and make it a locker room scene. I love cassettes (still) so it was fun to draw the walkman. The skates were much harder than I thought they’d be to get right.
Part 8 - 1995 - Do Something Pretty While You Can
9. What is your favorite illustrated novel and which one would you love to illustrate?
I don’t have one and I don’t want to illustrate another one.