About the book:
Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in seventeen connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic–-a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake –-as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.
Advance praise:
“French Girl is an arresting and beautiful memoir that evokes the infinite complications of daughterhood and motherhood in raw, gorgeous color. It pulses with heart, figuratively and literally.”
-Anthony Doerr
“French Girl delivers an enchanting and ethereal world paired with dreamy illustrations that evoke uncommon richness and depth of feeling. A true delight!”
-Aimee Nezhukumatathil
About the author:
Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is a writer, poet, and visual artist Her memoir Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2020, during the pandemic lock down in Uruguay, she began drawing for the first time in her life, posting one drawing a day on social media where they developed a large following. Her graphic narratives now appear regularly in literary magazines and her graphic memoir, French Girl, will be published in September by Fieldmouse Press.
Local author Amber Sparks will be joining Jesse Lee Kercheval in conversation.
Amber Sparks is the author of four collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and other Stories and The Unfinished World, and her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, The Cut and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator.