Dear Mini: A Graphic Memoir, Book One

In this energetic but meandering graphic memoir debut, the first of two planned volumes, Norris relates how as a young American just turned 17, she studied abroad in Nice and met a 15-year-old Austrian girl named Mini, and the pair tumbled through newfound freedoms into dangerous territory. The work is structured as a belated confessional letter, written more than a decade later in the present. After Norris’s trying adolescence coping with chronic pain and mental illness, the trip is her mother’s attempt to keep her out of trouble back home. But she and Mini share a predilection for spending nights out partying and hooking up with strangers. “So many men yelled at us—we were so proud,” she proclaims as they totter out on heels across the cobblestones of the city . Their sexual misadventures are drawn in wispy, bright comics art. “Even then, I was running from a darkness that for years had threatened to consume me,” Norris reveals, in cursive circling the image of her embrace with a transient lover. The chronicle culminates in a striking depiction of her “worst night,” a traumatic episode that leaves Norris feeling more alone than ever. Was Mini aware of her friend’s vulnerability, or too self-absorbed to notice? While the composition can get clunky, that central question and others reveal the vulnerability of these young women charging through a sometimes violent world of men, and recall the work of Ulli Lust and Phoebe Gloeckner. It’s an eye-opening and candid exposé. (July)