Cruddy - Lynda Barry

"Come ON, Roberta. Your turn." Julie had been talking but I hadn't really been listening. Something about how I would kill the unkillable hand. She said she would light it on fire. Many squirts of lighter fluid and then a match and then, "Whooooooosh!" she said. "Whoooooosh!" Incinerated. "You, Roberta. Your turn. How would you do it?"

"Stab it. Stab it and pound the knife in with a rock."

Julie scratched her nose and looked at me hard. Could she tell? Was it obvious that a second wave of Creeper was starting to wash over me? She said, "You could stab it, but it would still be alive though."

I said, "It wouldn't matter. It wouldn't be going anyplace."

"But it could still escape and come back after you."

"Not the way I'd do it, it wouldn't."

"I still think burning it."

I said, "But the bones, Julie. Bones crawl after everybody." (Cruddy pg. 128)

Preliminary content warning:: this book is heavily about child abuse and contains graphic scenes of children being exposed and subjected to gruesome violence including bodily harm/endangerment, substance abuse, sexual assault and physical abuse.

I've sort of been dictating conversations through a lens of personal experience lately. Maybe that's always the case for everyone, but in that, I've considered a lot of my work and its relationship to my experience. A poem I write is often me and about me but unclear. Indirect and catastrophizing. When I have a discussion with someone I sometimes bring my stories into the table more directly. "I've gone through this, which I think relates to your that" is the intention but I think it often does not hit that moment. I also try pretty hard to not just write about trauma, to not just sit in that still traumatized space. A poem I want to send to someone for publication is simply about the continuance of a walking onion. The beauty I see in life. It does not reflect me in it. We do not always have to write about what hurts.

Cruddy is a book that hurts.

Barry's work, which I've engaged with since 2020 has always been really well-written and obtuse. The images she brings to the table really astound me in their picturesque spaces. Her openness to possibility and leanings of teaching and examining herself through the imagined spaces of her comic representation are both touching and fun. I have felt connected by it. These remarks on the potentiality of expression. Bringing oneself through the table and into the limelight.

She also in these mainly autobiographical works - works that are both dramatized/made comic and yet are true and recounting memoirs - has not shied away form remarking on the abuse she underwent in her childhood or her struggles as a human being now living with her self. In particular I think about comics that involve her mother, a figure she consistently recognized for her abuse while remarking a need to document that status and the humor of her coming to who she is now regardless of that treatment. That she is a part of her life. This sort of continuing is what I meant earlier and something I really love in her work.

A lot of reviews will point to Cruddy as a comic work in line with her others but I don't really get that. It's sensational and explosively surreal like her other work, but I mostly felt horrible reading it. I don't think its devoid of humor - just like her other "lighter" work is - but a sense of dread and unending sadness takes over watching Roberta Rohbeson be a child in need of help and no one coming to save her.

I work with vulnerable adults now and have worked with children in the past. Being a "mandated reporter" is not new to me. Nor is the fact that when I see someone undergoing suffering, I rise to intercept it. I'm not good with not getting burnt out but I cannot in good conscience be passive when it comes to children's violence. That for me was so upsetting in this book. Reading her words and seeing no one help her. Not knowing if she would make it. Knowing that happens.

A while back I watched Nobody Knows and it floored me. This carries a similar feeling but the violence is not simply negligence but so extreme and active. In Cruddy there are cannibals, murders, dismemberment, suicides, acid overdoses, self harm, rotting corpses...I was going to compare it to Harmony Korine - a person whose movies I won't watch - but I think it's more like Crumb meets 80s schlock horror. If I could stomach the buckets of blood that are in House, probably that. Have you ever played Lisa? That too.

I do think it's probably my favorite between this and The Good Times are Killing Me albeit her comic work is still probably my favorite for how it manages to do what this does in both text and image. I think it's also a really hard to read work that you probably should read.