In her debut, The Mother: A Graphic Memoir, Rachel Deutsch pays blisteringly honest and acidly funny homage to the temporary hell that is brand-new parenting.
"I'd always wanted a baby," Deutsch writes; she figures "they would grow to only hate me a little." But when Deutsch finds herself pregnant, she worries: "What if I don't relate to being a mom? What if I become my mother?" After her daughter is born, Deutsch feels overwhelmed, and her relationship with her partner, Marc, suffers. They spar over who can legitimately claim to be more exhausted--"the winner was the one who could prove the other had more sleep." Deutsch and Marc go to couples therapy, and she sees a therapist independently to discuss her childhood, reinforcing readers' understanding that the book's title has two referents.
The Mother should be a balm to new parents who find themselves utterly upended by the initially mixed blessing that is the blessed event. Like Deutsch's text, her art has a take-me-as-I-am candor. She works with a sure hand and fills her fine lines with flat, grounding colors, and she packs big observations into even her modest-scale panels; one presents a side view of a bathtub with a mountainous dome of skin poking out: "My [pregnant] belly was a giant meatball in a tiny bowl of soup." And Deutsch surely wins the prize for best capturing the absurd-seeming proportions of a nursing mother's breasts, which in The Mother can take on the dimensions of swimming pool noodles. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer