Though memoirs are personal accounts, they speak to something quintessential in the human experience. Childhood, familial relationships, trauma, emerging into adulthood, struggling to find your place in the world: these are universal experiences. Yet, they can feel isolating. Memoirs allow the opportunity to dive into someone else’s world, see things from their perspective, and gain a deeper understanding of yourself. Graphic novel memoirs can create an even more visceral connection with the reader; they elicit emotion through language and art. Many LGBTQIA+ authors take to the drawing board to unpack their complicated journey of self-discovery, and the results are powerful. Let’s look at five moving graphic memoir novels from the LGBTQIA+ community.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
This critically acclaimed memoir follows Bechdel’s self-discovery through her childhood, teenage, and early adolescent years whilst charting her complicated relationship with her father. Equal parts hilarious and moving, Bechdel introduces us to her father, Bruce Bechdel, a man who wears many hats: a historic preservation expert with a fixation over repairing their Victorian family home, a high school English teacher, a funeral home director, a detached parent, and a closeted gay man who has been having affairs with the babysitter and male students. Drawn in stunning Victorian-style graphics that mirror the environment Bechdel was raised, Fun Home is a must-read graphic memoir.
It isn’t until Alison goes to college and begins having revelations about her sexuality that she discovers her father’s sexual identity and hidden past. Bruce Bechdel dies shortly after his disclosure, leaving Alison to unpack the mystery of her father. One of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Fun Home is written tactfully, brought to life with humor, and leaves its impact through the unflinching and masterful dissection of parent-child relationships.
The Third Person by Emma Grove
The Third Person is a riveting memoir that dives into the psychological state of a transgender woman seeking hormone replacement therapy. First needing the approval of a therapist for gender-affirming care, Emma starts seeing Toby. However, we soon find out that Emma has come to therapy sessions as two different people before this: an outgoing woman named Katrina and a passive, depressed man named Ed.
Emma has little to no memory of her behavior while presenting as these two people. Upon unpacking Emma’s childhood, we begin to identify potential explanations for why these two people have come to be. As Toby adapts the therapy sessions to analyze three people, questions of identity, trauma, and the path to healing come bubbling to the surface. Drawn in a classic comic style with vivid emotion, The Third Person is an immersive and fascinating testament to finding space to heal.
I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir by Maurice Vellekoop
Vellekoop paints a gripping, entertaining, and emotional portrait of his journey to loving himself, learning to forgive, and what it means to be an artist in his 2024 memoir, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together. Vellekoop charts his childhood growing up as a gay boy, with difficulty masking his true interests, in a conservative yet loving Calvinist family. Their church is intolerant of homosexuality, and though Ann, Vellekoop’s mother, loves her son, she too is unable to accept him. Her emotional distance sparks a long estrangement between Vellekoop and his family and sends him looking for community.
He finds it at Ontario College of Art, but just as he begins to explore his truth, romantic tragedies, a violent attack, and the dark era of the AIDS epidemic halt his progress. After getting lost in old childhood coping strategies, Maurice finds himself in psychotherapy dissecting the highs, lows, connections, and estrangements in his life. Messy, hilarious, and moving, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is a journey of self-love and healing.
Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir Of A Wuhanese American by Laura Gao
Laura Gao illustrates their coming-of-age story in their heart-warming and arresting memoir Messy Roots. After growing up in their early years in Wuhan, China, Laura moves to Texas with their family. Gao depicts the struggle of reconciling her childhood in China with the cultural shift of being an American teenager with new expectations and relationships. Gao’s coming-of-age story follows them right up to college, where they find community and begin culturally amalgamating. However, the COVID-19 pandemic confronts her with the racism seething in her new home over the events of her old home. Insightful, smart, and funny, Messy Roots is a gorgeous charting of past and present, bicultural identity, and personal development.
“Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself—as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”
— Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American Dream
Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash
Maggie Thrash takes us back to the horror and joy many of us have experienced: summer camp. Honor Girl follows Maggie Thrash on a transcendent summer spent at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, where she has spent the majority of her summers during her fifteen-year existence. When Maggie begins to fall for an older female counselor, Erin, she begins a gut-wrenching journey of self-discovery. In an environment where lesbian love feels unimaginable, Maggie struggles against her feelings and channels them into the rifle range. Upon the revelation that Erin may feel the same way, both Maggie and Camp Bellflower grapple to understand. Blunt and brilliant, Honor Girl is an unmissable and devastating romance about first love and first heartbreak.
These graphic novel memoirs simultaneously allow us to see the singularity of the human experience as well as its universality. All from LGBTQIA+ authors, there is a common strand of self-discovery, acceptance, and healing binding all of these memoirs together making it fruitful for readers in the community who are searching for answers in their own lives and readers at large seeking to understand different corners of the human perspective. Wherever you may come from, whomever you are attracted to, in the end, we all are united by certain things: embarrassment or shame you can’t shake from youth, difficulty navigating parental relationships, first love, first heartbreak, psychological pain, the necessity for self-acceptance, and so much more.
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