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Drawn from Life
New York Times best seller, Am I There Yet by Mari Andrew is of the lineage of women inked graphic novels.
A
By Jaq Greenspon few years back, Mari (rhymes with “starry”) Andrew was a late twenty something who was going through a pretty severe breakup. This isn’t a new phenomenon, mind you, people in their late twenties have been going through breakups for a while now (they were probably doing it even longer ago than one would expect, but due to societal norms and based upon what us Gen Xers have seen on TV, no one really talked about when they did). But where this story breaks a bit differently is with just precisely how Ms. Andrew decided to deal with it. See, rather than jump out of an airplane or join a wine and cheese club or swear to give up dating altogether all of which are perfectly fine responses,
by the way), she decided to draw out her frustrations and pain. By which I don’t mean she extended them. No, she literally drew them, with pens and crayons and pencils, onto a piece of paper to get them out in the world. As she says, when going through her tough time, she was looking for a new and different way to express herself. After a multitude of other creative endeavors, it turned out it was the artistic scribbling which seemed to fit the bill. “I decided to make one drawing a day for a year and put up my doodles on Instagram to keep myself accountable,” she explains on her web page. “First my mom followed, then my friends followed, then strangers started following, which was super exciting and weird and wonderful.” Currently, on Instagram, she has over 785,000 followers, which is a whole lot of strangers. Enough so that Clarkson Potter, a division of Random House, took a chance on her and, this past March, published her book, Am
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4/26/18 9:40 AM