Amy Kurzweil

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.)… (plus d'informations)

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!… (plus d'informations)

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?”… (plus d'informations)