How I Tried to Be a Good Person

by Ulli Lust

Overview

This graphic memoir is about obsession, gender conflict, and self-liberation, told with an honesty few cartoonists are capable of.

Lust's follow-up to her first internationally lauded graphic memoir, How I Tried to Be a Good Person, picks up directly where its predecessor left off. Revealing and powerful, Lust recounts her life as a young, enthusiastic anarchist making her way in Vienna in the 1990s - and of her love for two men: the "perfect companion" Georg, an actor twenty years her elder, and the "perfect lover," Kimata, a Nigerian man-about-town. As her relationships with the two men evolve, jealousy increasingly mounts and leads to emotional and violent outbreaks that threaten her life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683962038
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Edition description:	1
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ulli Lust was born in 1967 in Vienna, Austria. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Editorial Reviews

05/20/2019

Lust’s intimate and imaginative follow-up graphic memoir to her Ignatz award–winning punk travelogue Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life picks up when she is an unemployed and uncertain 20-something mother. Early on, the structure meanders along with Ulli’s life choices: she bounces back and forth between Vienna and the countryside, where her son lives with her parents, and between dating an older actor, Georg, and her working-class Nigerian boyfriend, Kimata. Georg is okay with the arrangement, but Kimata claims, “I’m an African man. I can’t be with a woman who loves two men.” Ulli waits out his tortured rages with cool avoidance; then it’s back to sex. When Kimata’s angst takes a violent turn, the political and cultural forces that seemed like background noise come into sharp, painful focus: 1980s and ’90s Austria may be a place where health insurance flows like water, but it also treats immigrants and domestic violence survivors with tragic disdain. Lust tells her story as she draws it: straightforward, detailed, and explicit. Her black-and-white line drawings, spot-colored with pink, are chock-full with penises, hairy vulvas, and joyously fanciful backdrops. Lust’s frank rendition makes plain how passions (both artistic and bodily) may inspire horrible decision-making, but they can also drive people to figure out who they truly are. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Lust’s bluntly honest account grants us a look at a courageous but alarming life."

Booklist

"Lust’s energetic, searching book ... reveals the power of desire — and the pain when jealousy rears its head."

The Guardian

"Lust’s examination of a pivotal and formative period of her life leaves no stone unturned and stands out for its absolute emotional honesty. Brave, confident, and visually literate in the extreme, How I Tried establishes its author as a true master of the medium."

Four Color Apocalypse

"Lust is determined to live her truth, even occasionally putting herself in physical danger. At other times, she’s left contemplating the line between self-actualization and selfishness. Lust relates all this in an uncompromisingly frank manner, with anthropological detail. It’s a rich narrative."

The Comics Journal

"The very definition of a warts and all memoir, this is a complex and meaty read."

Irish Examiner

"A wonderful testament to the power of auto-bio graphic memoir."

Comics Grinder

08/23/2019

Lust (Voices in the Dark) presents a slice of her life that is by turns mundane and passionate. After a far-flung, dangerous adolescence (chronicled in Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life), twentysomething Lust is just getting by in Vienna—taking unemployment while pursuing illustration, toying with applying to art school, and occasionally visiting her son who lives with her parents in the countryside. Her easygoing attitude finds her navigating consensual nonmonogamy long before it was cool—there's Georg, an older actor, with whom she has an intellectual, artistic relationship, and Kimata, a young Nigerian man with whom she has a passionate (and quite graphic) physical relationship. As Lust tiptoes into adulthood, she tries to stay true to herself, and it isn't easy. Lust's commitment to depicting her own complexity, warts and all, and not moralizing or apologizing for it, is a singular gift. Furthermore, her artistic style is flowing but precise, making daily minutiae and explosive arguments all of a piece. VERDICT Intensely personal and sexually explicit, this chronicle of Lust's young adulthood life is told with specificity and scrutiny, ideal for adult graphic memoir enthusiasts. [Previewed in Ingrid Bohnenkamp's "Mass Appeal," 6/19.]—Emilia Packard, Tokyo, Japan

Library Journal