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By any objective measure, Adrian Tomine is a success: from his groundbreaking and definitive Optic Nerve comic to his work in the @NewYorker, Tomine is a great and influential artist; add to that his happy family life with his delightful kids for a double success.
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But if there's one lesson in Tomine's new memoir, "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist," it's that when he reflects on his career, he doesn't feel like a success - the moments that stand out are the humiliations great and small.
https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/loneliness-long-distance-cartoonist
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https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/loneliness-long-distance-cartoonist
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All of us have experienced our brains' perverse tendency to use idle moments to endlessly replay those instants in which we were embarrassed, hurt, or made to look foolish, and "Loneliness" is a pitiless tour through Tomine's own torments.
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When I reviewed @hodgman's excellent 2019 memoir Medallion Status, I wrote about how his work reminds me of the aphorism that "comparison is the thief of joy." Like Tomine, much of Hodgman's torment comes from comparing his career with others'.
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It's a pathology that we're all prey to, but Tomine's own merciless dissection of his anxieties hints at why people in the arts may have it worse - it's a career with little external validation for the first formative years (decades).
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During those years of form rejections, obscurity and failure, your only gauge of your success are the tiny crumbs of validation - a scrawled personal note on the rejection slip, a sale to a "little magazine," a clerk at your local store who says a kind word.
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And even as you are training yourself to hunt endlessly for these things, you're also motivating yourself by imagining what a "breakthrough" might bring, fantasizing about how great the people who've done well already must have it.
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These two habits - comparison and the quest for external validation - are a recipe for neurotic self-loathing and doubt. Because nothing lives up to the fantasy of what "success" feels like, and no amount of validation can bridge that gap.
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Tomine shows just how bad this gets, making himself literally sick, so much so that he lands in the hospital and thinks he may be dying. This provokes a reckoning at the book's climax that makes it more than an R Crumbish journey through neurosis.
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Instead, it casts the whole book in a new light, one in which success is redefined as something much more personal, much more humane, and much more attainable.
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The world is full of "successful" people who are both miserable and miserable to be around. With "Loneliness," Tomine sheds light on how those people came to be that way - and why it needn't be so.
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