A Glorious Freedom Read online

  She continued to think and work in new ways, creating some of her most complicated sculptural work and writing her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her 90s. She worked daily nearly until her death at age 105 in 1998.

  discovered graphic novels at the age of 43, around the same time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After two decades of writing fiction and illustrating children’s books, Jennifer decided she wanted to make comics. Her first book, the autobiographical collection Underwire, was published in 2011 and subsequently excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. In 2015, Jennifer published her debut graphic novel—a 352-page memoir about her life and experience with breast cancer. Aptly titled The Story of My Tits, the book was named one of the best graphic novels of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Forbes, and Library Journal, among many others. Jennifer’s comics, full of moxie and humor, have been featured in The ACT-I-VATE Primer, Cousin Corinne’s Reminder, and the Strumpet. At age 55, she’s currently finishing a graphic diary spanning the trials and successes of the last three and a half years, along with a new fiction graphic novel.

  Lisa: Tell us the germination of your creative journey.

  Jennifer: From the start, I was drawing and writing. It was always those two things, and I never wondered until I got out of college which one I would do. In college I majored in art history, but quietly on my own I minored in English. I saturated myself with books because I wanted to be a writer, and if I was going to do art, I was just going to write about it. This was always a war within me while I was learning about both art forms. Then I graduated from college and tried to become the great American novelist and sucked big time. I wrote three really long, very bad novels—even winning a grant for the first chapter of one of them, but that book never panned out. So by the time I had children, I was a disappointed novelist and I craved drawing again. I began illustrating anything I could get my hands on, and then that turned into illustrating children’s books. The problem was that it was a very G-rated community and I swear like a sailor. It was like Mae West going to Sunday school. And then I was in the middle of illustrating a children’s book when I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  Lisa: And that became the beginning of a new chapter for you.

  Jennifer: I was 43. The world came crashing down around me and I discovered comics. I had read comics when I was a little girl—but then I discovered graphic novels, which had really come of age and gotten interesting. Believe it or not, a New York Times article turned me on to them. First I read all of the women’s books in the article and then I branched out and I couldn’t stop reading and I said, This is what I should be doing. This is drawing and writing. I knew I wanted to tell my own breast cancer story to other women who were going to go through it or had been through it. In the course of it, I realized I actually wanted to expand it to a full memoir, of which the breast cancer survivor story would be a piece. And I gave myself a year to read all of the best graphic novels I could find—if I didn’t like one, I threw it out the window. Then I made myself sit down and start, not knowing where it would go or how I would do it.

  Lisa: What did your process look like?

  Jennifer: I did it the only way I could think of doing it; I took my format from Lynda Barry (and I recently had a chance to admit to her that I took it and she threw her arms around me and said, “Of course you did! There’s no copyright on this shit! Go for it!” and that really made me feel better), because I just decided it doesn’t matter what the format is. It just matters that you begin, and you know what you want to say. Once you have the format, you’ll just squirt it in there, like toothpaste. So, I took that and then I decided what size I wanted my little boxes to be. I wasn’t going to mess with page layout because I was a beginner. I made a little cardboard square the size I wanted and cut it out, and I used that as a template. I drew panel by panel rather than page by page, the way most artists do, because repeating characters is hard for me. And I would assemble the pages in Photoshop after scanning the individual panels.

  Oddly, even though I’d been doing a lot of it, the writing was the hardest part for me. I was afraid I’d fall into the same bad habits I’d had when I was trying to write novels: I was very self-conscious, I was heavy-handed, it never sounded like me. That didn’t happen. I was so relieved. But I always kept a notebook next to me and I would decide on the narrative that would go into the panel, first by writing and rewriting until it sounded right in the notebook, and then I would write it down in pen in the panel.

  Lisa: From start to finish, how long did it take you to complete The Story of My Tits?

  Jennifer: Well, I worked on a lot of other things while I was doing it, but it took eight years. I finished it when I was 52.

  Lisa: Did you have a publisher when you started it, or did that happen later?

  Jennifer: It happened later. You have to understand that I’m a very impractical person. When I lived through breast cancer, a number of things got sort of burned off me and one of them was that I let go of being a working, paid illustrator. I realized I didn’t know how much time I had left—and because of that, I just wasn’t going to fuck around. I wasn’t going to do anything that wasn’t absolutely mine and from the heart, and that extended to the words, the pictures, the number of pages, what I included in the story, and the fact that I might have to self-publish it or it might not get published at all. But it was my document and I was going to do it my way. And that’s how I really picked my publisher, and sort of how they picked me.

  My publisher, Top Shelf, is famous for publishing really heartfelt, sincere, and wonderful books, and part of the reason is they give their artists a huge amount of legroom and let them do what they’re doing. They rejected me about four or five times. I started going to conventions—these publishers are at the convention and you can just go talk to them. I would go talk to this guy and say, “You know, I have a couple of kids, I’m still doing children’s book illustrations, and it’s kind of slow, but here’s what I want to do.” And he’d say, “Oh, that sounds good! Keep submitting it, we’ll see.” And finally, when it was ninety pages, he said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll sign this. We want this.” But then I didn’t show it to anybody for the next five years. I just did it alone, and he didn’t ask for anything.

  Lisa: I think that’s how more and more people—especially self-taught people who aren’t already connected to an industry—get started. They’re just very perseverant in working on something that they feel very strongly about.

  Jennifer: And ironically I’ve made more money off this book than off any other project I’ve done, but I had a feeling that you had to cut your heart out and put it on a platter and serve it to people to get anywhere in this life. I’m pleased that’s true, it’s just that it’s a great deal of internal labor. But if you think you can shortcut that, you can’t. And luckily something happened to me that really cut me open so it was, in a way, easy.

  Lisa: By the time you published this novel you were over 50 and you were just starting out—this was your debut novel. Comics and graphic novels are a very male-dominated genre, not that there aren’t a lot of amazing women who gained notoriety in the last ten years. Have you faced any adversity due to your age and your sex, and if so, how do you deal with it?

  Jennifer: When I’m at shows, I definitely get the look like, “What, are you here with your son? I mean, what are you doing here? Are you someone’s mom?” So, that was my only issue. And I think women get much more trouble from guys in the more profitable superhero comics industry. There are entrenched behaviors there that finally are getting rooted out—sexism, discrimination and harassment, and awful shit going on. But in indie comics, I haven’t seen that. There are a ton of really talented women in indie comics, and they’ve done great work. And the guys aren’t sitting around saying women don’t know how to do this.

  So when I got into this, I became part of ACT-I-VATE, a comics studio based in Brooklyn. We used to go out and do things, like New York Comic Con and some o
ther conventions. I was so happy with this environment—it was so freewheeling and welcoming, and I really didn’t get any crap from males except young men who couldn’t figure out what this old bat was doing at the table.

  I would get on these panels, and I was always champing at the bit to explain: You boys have yet to live the material that you’re craving, that you want to write down, and I have lived it. You will have lived it when you have reached my age, and then you will see. I always think of it as if I’m standing in a cavern out West, and the sides of these caverns that these rivers have carved are so amazing with all the stripes of all the different kinds of rock, and the older you get, you’re deeper in that cavern and your life has carved away so much more of this rock. You can look at the pattern and go, Wow, check that out, oh I see what I was doing there, oh that was crazy, oh you’ve been wanting to do this all your life, and it’s so satisfying to be standing there seeing this.

  I was such a frustrated 20-something when I wanted to write a huge book and I had nothing to say, I mean nothing! And I just hadn’t lived yet, and I hadn’t opened up, and I hadn’t been broken by life essentially and been broken open. If I felt threatened because I had wrinkles and a few gray hairs, and I was kind of out of shape compared to these nine-pound beautiful hipsters, I’d just think to myself, It’s all about what’s on the page. Don’t worry about this. Worry about your project, get it finished, put it out there, and see what happens. And that would keep me going.

  Lisa: So it’s clear you believe your work has something now that it wouldn’t have had if you’d gotten into this in your 20s or 30s. Why is that?

  Jennifer: My emphasis has always been about how much life you can get onto the page. If you’re too critical and too hung up on technique and the tradition of technique, then that’s very hard to do. I know that I squelched the hell out of that life-giving part of myself in my 20s and early 30s. I was very disapproving of my own work in those days, and I think if I’d gotten into comics then, I would’ve screwed them up for myself just as badly as I screwed up writing.

  Then I had kids. That is just such a great way to get rid of your dignity. And it makes us all pretty democratic and makes us realize that, in spite of our failings, we have got it on the ball—so there’s that for a confidence booster and a channel for creativity.

  And, undoubtedly, going through breast cancer helped, too—I had one interviewer ask me if this book would exist without cancer, and I said no. That experience did the rest of what I had to do to my dignity and my self-control and my internal editor. I just threw it completely to the wind and said, I’m going to do this naked on horseback. I didn’t care anymore. That’s a part of the speed and whirlwind of distraction that occurs at middle age. I’m sure my anxiety and my ADHD decreased with time, and as the things pushing against me increased—two kids, pets, people around me, aging parents—those things too, putting pressure on me, forced me to crystallize whatever it was I was doing and what I was wanting to say. There’s no time to write all day and throw it all in the trash, the way I used to do in my 20s.

  Lisa: What advice would you give to women who are just getting started with a new challenge later in life?

  Jennifer: It’s funny, I read this quote in More magazine, embarrassingly enough, and they said that most women in middle age go back to school for knowledge, thinking that they don’t know enough to, say, start their own business or write a novel or whatever it is. This woman’s advice was: don’t do that. You already know what it is, just do it. And that really struck a chord with me because that was my attitude. I thought it was just because I had breast cancer, but I realized, looking around after a while, that a lot of women at that age were having the same attitude I was having, which was, “You know what? To hell with this. I’m not going to patriarchy school to learn how all you white boys do your stuff. I’m going to just do it.” And a big part of my book and my experience with breast cancer was this attachment I formed to this goddess image. I was feeling as if she was transmitting this book to me, honestly, if I’m going to be completely weird about this. I would feel very certain about what I was putting down on paper because I could feel her approval and encouragement, and it was very internalized and very deep. I just finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, about discovering the sacred feminine inside her after having been raised in the very masculine Baptist church. I was raised to be a feminist in my family, so I had a different trip—but you can still hold yourself down in whatever pursuit you’re in. So my advice is just get out there, take off your underpants, and just run into the ocean and do it. You already know what you have, you already know what to do, so speed it up, don’t slow it down.

  pursued a career in figure skating and spent fifteen years as an editor at Vogue before her own wedding at age 40 propelled her into the world of fashion design and her name became synonymous with matrimonial elegance.

  Vera was born in New York City in 1949 to a wealthy immigrant family from Shanghai, China. As a young girl, she was passionate about figure skating, and she devoted much of her childhood and teen years to arduous practice and frequent competitions. At 19, she competed for a place at the 1968 Olympics but failed to make the team. After graduating from college, Vera transferred her focus and dedication from figure skating to fashion and was hired as an assistant at Vogue magazine. She quickly impressed the staff and worked her way up to becoming one of the magazine’s youngest fashion editors. In 1987, after fifteen years at Vogue, Vera was passed over for the position of editor in chief (the position went to her friend Anna Wintour), and she left the magazine to join the design staff at Ralph Lauren.

  A few years later, as she was planning her wedding, Vera became frustrated with the selection of bridal wear available. Recognizing a need for sophisticated gowns, she opened her first bridal boutique in 1990 and began to hone her skills as a fashion designer as she entered her 40s. She revisited her first passion when she designed an ensemble for figure skater Nancy Kerrigan for the 1994 Olympics, a sleek silhouette that captured America’s attention. Her elegant and modern designs quickly became the standard of not just bridal wear but of Hollywood glamour as she began designing event gowns for actresses and celebrities. Over the past twenty-five years, her design empire has grown to include ready-to-wear, fragrance, jewelry, and even dinnerware. Vera, now in her 60s, continues to put her own distinctive touch on all of it.

  is a mother, social entrepreneur, model, and founder of the maternal health organization Every Mother Counts (EMC). She is best known as one of the most famous supermodels of the 1990s, when she graced the covers of countless international fashion magazines and was featured in notable campaigns for Calvin Klein, Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Versace, and Maybelline, to name a few. Two decades later, at the age of 41, Christy became an influential activist, founding Every Mother Counts, a nonprofit organization working tirelessly to improve access to maternal health care in the United States and developing nations abroad. Christy has since produced three documentary films on maternal health and become an avid distance runner, completing five marathons. In 2015, at the age of 47 and with only five short years as a runner, she ranked among the world’s elite runners when she qualified for the Boston Marathon. Christy has been recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. In March 2016, EMC was recognized as one of Fast Company magazine’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Not-for-Profit.

  Lisa: You started your organization Every Mother Counts at age 41. How did you become interested in maternal health?

  Christy: I had a really complicated birth with my first child. In the weeks postpartum, when I was recovering and trying to learn from what had happened, I came across the startling statistics for deaths from complications during childbirth for girls and women around the world. I also learned that the complication I had experienced and survived was the leading cause of maternal death. I couldn’t “unknow” that information, and I started to activel
y think about how I could use this experience to help others going into motherhood.

  I had the good fortune to be invited by a large NGO called CARE to travel to Central America, which is where my mom is from and where I spent many, many summers as a child. I was pregnant with my second child when I visited, and it was there that I had the actual aha moment: If I had delivered my daughter in one of these villages without paved roads, what would’ve happened? And I was pretty certain in a lot of other parts of the world, including in the United States, I probably wouldn’t have survived. And that blew me away. From there, I knew I had to do something, and that’s how Every Mother Counts was born.

  Lisa: You became a marathon runner in your 40s, and there is a deep connection between your running and your leadership of Every Mother Counts.

  Christy: It happened kind of accidentally. In 2011, we had a call from the New York City Marathon saying they had ten spots they wanted to give to Every Mother Counts, and we could do whatever we wanted with them. As soon as we got the call, suddenly I thought, Well, wait a minute. This could be on my bucket list. I can’t imagine having a team and not being on it.

  Lisa: I read somewhere that prior to running marathons, you had never run more than 3 or 5 miles?

  Christy: Yes, I ran short distances as a kid and loved it. As an adult, I would run periodically just for exercise. In the early days traveling for my career, most hotels didn’t have gyms. So the best thing to do was to get out and run. But I would run no more than 4 miles maximum.

  The year before I did the New York City Marathon, a friend had asked me to chair a 5K for lung cancer on Long Island. My dad died of lung cancer, so when they asked me, I was like, “Sure, absolutely. Of course I’ll do it.” And I dedicated the race to him. I trained a little bit, but it was not out of my capabilities. I did that race in August of 2010, and it was brutally hot. It was miserable. I had gone to a 40th birthday party the night before, so I was up late, and I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, it’s so painful! But then it also occurred to me, Oh, I’m so lucky to be able to use my lungs, to be able to breathe. And so it also felt really empowering.