But You Have Friends by Emilia McKenzie

Every story is specific - not just the events told, but how they're told, who is telling them, and where we the audience fits into the whole thing. It's why there can be multiple biographies of the same person with radically different takes: same story, different slant.

Some stories are personal, to the point that the creator wonders if she should even tell it - if it's really her story to tell. But there's always a way to tell a story - your way - even if it's mostly someone else's story. There's always a way to be honest and true.

Emilia McKenzie's graphic memoir But You Have Friends is the story of a friendship. That friendship ended abruptly and violently: Emi's friend Charlotte died in 2018, by suicide, after several years of escalating bouts of depression.

There could be a story of Charlotte's life; this isn't it. McKenzie says she deliberately focused the way she did, to tell the story that was hers to tell. These are the comics pages she made, starting soon after Charlotte's death, to remember her friend and put as much down on paper as she could. To turn it into a story she could share. So this is specific and personal - the story of a friend remembered afterward - but not a memoir of mental illness or a full story of Charlotte's life. McKenzie made a good choice there: Friends is specific and grounded and particular, in all the ways that makes it relatable and universal.

McKenzie uses a crisp art style here, all thin lines and a light grey tone, illustrative in its big-eyed faces and minimalist backgrounds, mostly in a six-panel grid. She narrates this story heavily, so there are a lot of captions as well as dialogue - her lettering is clear and easily readable. It's a friendly, welcoming book, about two women and their times together, starting when they met in the middle of their school years.

(Both are British, and met at school in Britain, so exactly which year and what that translates to in American is slightly vague to me - looks like they were tweens.)

We get some of McKenzie's life here, because she lived it, and many of the ways that life intersected with Charlotte's, especially in those early school years before they went off to separate universities and started their adult lives. Friends is a book about the ways you can just click with a specific person, how you understand each other and extend each other, sharing ideas and becoming more yourselves for having a mirror or model.

Friends is told in lots of short chapters or moments - it's made up of memories, organized chronologically, to tell the story of what it was like to be in this friendship, to be one of these two people. It's a lovely book, inevitably sad but ultimately positive. It doesn't claim to be more than it is, but what it is is plenty.