You might not have heard of her, but Raina Telgemeier is an author who defines a generation of children’s literature, and whose books have encapsulated a generation’s experience of childhood.
Already a subscriber?If you do not have a child under 16, or are not yourself under 16, you might have no idea who Raina is. So it was with me. I called a friend with kids and said, “Have you heard of an author named Raina Telgemeier?”
“The magic of Raina is real,” confirmed a school librarian who’d brought her daughter to meet Telgemeier here, at a public event celebrating the author’s first retrospective. Every spring, the librarian told me, she runs a report to determine which of the library’s books have been checked out the most. It was June, so she could share that, once again, “four out of the top five are Raina books. Children reread those books over and over and over.
The popularity of these books has overlapped with years during which clinical anxiety among American children and adolescents has reached new heights – so much so that multiple organisations, including the American Academy of Paediatrics, noting a rise in depression, too, declared a state of emergency in 2021.
Telgemeier has never stopped drawing her monsters. All through grade school, middle school, and high school, she’d sit down in the afternoon and draw what had happened that day, sometimes amending what she had actually said into what she wished she’d said. The panel shows Raina caught in ripples of sickening green that radiate outward from her head to fill the whole frame. Her teeth are gritted; her hands grip her hair tightly, but a curl escapes. Her own thought balloons swim around her, choking off any view of where she is or who she’s with. “What if I’m next?” one reads. The next three, swelling in size: “What if? WHAT IF? WHAT IF!?”
Here, Telgemeier draws an entire spread with no words. The left-hand page has three frames: Callie running out of the school doors, looking concerned; Callie arriving at a chain-link fence, a little puff of her breath condensing in the chilly air around her; Callie’s face seen through the chain link, eyes wide. The right-hand page pulls back to show the whole diamond and a stand of trees beyond it. Callie, looking small, is clutching the fence with both hands. She’s alone; the field is empty.
Young Raina navigates the tension between her desire to feel loved by and connected to others and her craving for privacy – she needs space away from people to feel her big feelings and to process them into art. When the pandemic hit, Telgemeier found herself home alone, not travelling for the first time in recent memory. Social distancing came easily to her – she’d been doing it for years during flu season.
Telgemeier’s books offer an antidote to that kind of isolation. By making anxiety the obstacle faced by a compelling, sympathetic hero, these books reveal the possibility that a reader with her own psychological struggles – panic attacks or emetophobia or hair pulling or big sadness – might wind up okay, or even great.“I know,” she says, half-smiling. “I wish I’d had it too.
What’s more, the manuscript told a story that extended beyond Raina’s childhood into Telgemeier’s adult life as an artist – would readers want that? Telgemeier agreed to put the manuscript in a drawer for a little while. On the day of the museum event, I float around the lobby, interviewing the kids who looked especially rapturous. “What do you like about Raina books?” I ask Cassie, the eight-year-old from Philadelphia. She pauses for a second, then smiles sheepishly. “I like everything about them. They’re funny and, like, I’ve been through a lot of the stuff that she’s been through … A bunch of the stuff in– like the anxiety and needing therapy.” She speaks so softly that I have to bend down to hear her.
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