One! Hundred! Demons!

In the final chapters of this graphic memoir, Barry turns her eye to the outside world and considers the way her identity and art intersect with gender, politics, and class.

In “Girlness” and “Lost and Found,” Barry frankly analyzes the way the comparatively low social class of her neighborhood shaped her as a person and an artist. First, she observes the relationship between class and gender, noting that many trappings of presenting as girlish, like pretty clothes and high-maintenance long hair, require money. Since child Barry doesn’t have access to any of these girlish things, she develops envy and resentment toward those who do. As an adult, she still has trouble connecting with the girlish side of herself that delights in cute stationary. She wrings her hands with guilt and shame over the prospect of buying the stationary, trapped in a pattern of thinking that came from the resentment of her childhood. This internalized pain offers a contrast to the bitterness of Barry’s mother at seeing girls with the accoutrements of girlishness; survival in wartime meant never having access to such things in her childhood in the Philippines—pain that she now expresses as rage.

In “Lost and Found,” Barry connects her childhood social class to her identity as an artist interacting with other artists. While other wealthier writers had access to a canon of classic children’s literature, Barry read more accessible and commercial texts like the classified section of the newspaper and the stories in Reader’s Digest. As a result, her work maintains a deeply accessible and unpretentious quality even as it acutely and thoughtfully examines complex topics—one way that shows How Creativity Transforms During Adolescence via outside influences. Though some of the literary types she encounters do not fully respect the depth of her work in comics, Barry understands that she has a strong handle on her own expression and doesn’t need any institutional trappings or literary pedigree. Her work advocates for a less elitist atmosphere around creating and consuming art. Ironically, her work has often been featured in some ostensibly high-brow platforms that often publish the literati that she critiques here, such as The New Yorker magazine.

In “Election,” Barry again considers the nature of her art through the lens of a close presidential election with sensational media coverage. Barry analyzes her obsession with the story of that election and the intense hope and fear it inspired in her. She considers the fallacy in most storytelling, which promises that “good” will be victorious in the end. Barry’s own tough life experiences contradict that promise. Barry didn’t have the luxury of living a sheltered life as child, protected from the unfairness of cruelty and abuse; she often observed powerful “bad guys” prevail without any repercussions—a trajectory she sees playing out yet again in the election, in which George W. Bush’s lost the vote to Al Gore but was declared president by the US Supreme Court anyway. Only when Barry conceptualizes something like the election as a story, can she hope for the familiar ending where good vanquishes evil. Story is a vector for hope, while reality often vanquishes that hope.