Amy KurzweilCritiques

In her other book, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, Amy Kurzweil looked at the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother in way I found sloppy and unstructured. Here it's the lives of her father and paternal grandfather that Amy skitters between in her unfocused, disordered manner.

Her father is Ray Kurzweil, who is apparently a famous inventor and futurist. I was previously unfamiliar with him, but he comes off here as a real crackpot with daddy issues, obsessed with his own immortality and the resurrection of his father, Fredric, in some form of artificial intelligence, starting with the pretty dicey chatbot featured extensively in this book. Amy enables and caters to Ray's projects in hopes of connecting better with Fredric herself, but he pretty much remains a cipher throughout.

I was bored with all the jumbled details of her family and the flights of philosophical fancy they inspired in her. And I was annoyed that some proofreader didn't catch the misspellings of the names of Bess Myerson and Karel Čapek.

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.)

This is an interesting graphic memoir that I actually got for my daughter a few years ago, but when she moved recently she confessed that she never read it, and likely never would, so I repossessed it. Having read it, I suppose there is stuff there that would appeal to her -- the same stuff I thought she might like when I originally bought it -- but there is also stuff that she probably wouldn't care about. Amy Kurzweil is an artist and a writer, and this memoir details not just her experience growing up with anxiety, but also her relationship with her psychologist mother, and her Holocaust survivor grandmother. It is definitely a rumination on three generations of Jewish women, their struggles and their triumphs. Do they always get along? No. Do they respect one another? Usually. In those ways, they are no different than any other family -- loving and criticizing each other in equal measure, as only families can. I think I found the grandmother's story the most interesting -- and indeed, most of the book is about Amy documenting those stories. She managed to avoid the concentration camps in Hitler's Europe, instead surviving by passing as a Catholic (her Aryan looks helped with that), living in a series of homes and farms. It also describes her life after the war, which we don't hear about a lot -- people scraping to survive in squalid conditions that did not ease for many years, particularly in eastern Europe, which was ravaged by the war in more ways than one. But, Bubbe emerged from that experience a feisty, no-nonsense woman who continues to show the pluck that probably helped her survive. Anyway, this is an evocative story about the lives of Jewish women over almost a century. I'm glad I rescued it from my daughter's recycling pile!

This memoir focuses on the author’s grandmother and mother, both complicated, fascinating women who hover over Amy and give her no peace, as much as she adores and depends on them. Bubbe is a Holocaust survivor, and her story alone could fill a book (and probably should have). Sonya is an academic and a therapist, with strange obsessions of her own and is seemingly the only parent involved in Amy’s upbringing. And Amy is seemingly conflicted by everything - she's a child hypochondriac, a Jew who questions Israel's role in Palestine, and she shrugs off her Stanford education. I'm not sure of what makes this graphic novel less endearing than it should be. It could be the omissions - Amy is a dance teacher, though there's barely no mention of how she trained and teaches. She's also the daughter of globally recognized technologist Ray Kurzweil and makes no mention of him in her childhood memories. The only clue about her romantic life is a crush on a high school classmate. As Alison Bechdel wrote one book about her father and one book about her mother, and then a book about herself, perhaps Amy should have done the same. What’s here is good (the writing far better than the art) but there’s just not enough of the author in it.

Quote: “The women in my family have certain stories to tell. Why does it feel like I’m not the protagonist of my own life?”½

Pro: no panels so storybook feel, captured joy/weight of Jewish intellectual heritage
Con: floppy lines I couldn’t get lost in

I wish I would have liked this better. It was an #LMPBC read otherwise I would have DNFed it. It’s a story of a young lady, her jewish-ness, her mother, her grandmother, and the Holocaust. At its heart I feel this book wants to be Maus. It even references Maus, but it is such a lackluster comparison. Much of the story is Amy trying to decide what customs and activities of jewish life are relevant to her, while living with childhood anxiety, an overbearing mother, and the weight of her flighty grandmothers stories. Amy has this want and drive to collect and tell her grandmother’s stories, I just wish she would have taken herself out of the equation.

Amy switches time periods and locations with no notice and it is hard to tell. There is not break. You can tell her grandmother’s story of surviving the war apart from everything else from not only how it was worded but also how it was typeset. But everything else mashes together like peas carrots and mashed potatoes. But the potatoes are burnt and it ruins the entire thing.

I really wish the author had taken a chronological approach. Her story of finding her Jewishness was interesting. Her story with her overbearing and analytical mother was interesting. Grandmother’s stories were interesting. But they should have been separated, and a better timeline flow should have been seen to.

While many love this book, I do not. And that is okay. Others see things I don’t and vice versa. For someone this will hold the thrill and passion that I found in Maus. And for them I am happy.

Too sloppy, unstructured and all over the place for my taste, both in story and art. Just when I'd start to get interested in a section it would abruptly end and the story would go flying off in a whole different direction, never to return, leaving me unsatisfied. I don't feel the stories of the grandmother, mother and daughter were interwoven well enough to gel into a singular work. I'd have preferred separate volumes about the daughter and grandmother with stronger focus on each. (The mother sort of falls through the cracks and didn't leave much of an impression on me.)

This autobiographical graphic novel, tells the tale of three generations of women, including the author. The stand-out here is the author's grandmother, was able to escape from a concentration camp as a young girl and survives the war on her own daring and wits. Plus, she is such a hoot and a free spirit, as an aged woman, telling her story. This is a wonderful family memoir- funny, sad ,insightful and nicely illustrated.

From Amazon Review: Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil’s debut, tells the stories of three unforgettable women. Amy weaves her own coming-of-age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a psychologist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile. Captivated by Bubbe’s story, Amy turns to her sketchbooks, teaching herself to draw as a way to cope with what she discovers. Entwining the voices and histories of these three wise, hilarious, and very different women, Amy creates a portrait not only of what it means to be part of a family, but also of how each generation bears the imprint of the past.

Kirkus Reviews, 2016