Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.

Everyone's life is different. Some people have relatively easy lives, some don't. We can forget how wide that spectrum is: there are a lot of people on the "relatively easy" side who don't realize where they actually sit. So seeing something from the far opposite end can be bracing, or frightening, or saddening, or centering, or all of those things at once.

Kayla E. is a cartoonist who had a horrifically bad childhood. She's been turning stories of that childhood into comics under the overall title Precious Rubbish for a few years now, and the book of that name - just published this spring - collects almost two hundred pages of those strips and related material, to tell something like the full story of that childhood.

This is a mosaic rather than a narrative; there's no clear organizing principle of the book Precious Rubbish. We're thrown into the world of young Kayla as, I suppose, she was herself, growing up this way.

I was going to start with a list of young Kayla's troubles, but I worried that could come across as dismissive, or questioning, or mocking. But it is so central, that a catalog - blunt as that may be - is important, so readers understand just how much was going on, how interlocked it all was, how far to the bad side this one childhood was.

Young Kayla had at least four things that could easily be the basis of a "I had a horrible childhood" memoir.

Before any of the actual trauma, she was poor and half-Mexican in Texas, a state not notably generous or full of supports for the poor. Her parents divorced when she was three, in the early 1990s. She had one brother, a few years older. Her father claimed her mother was unfit, and got custody of the brother - but didn't try to get custody of young Kayla. So she lived with that mother, with weekends and other visits to the father. Her father remarried for a few years, and young Kayla's stepmother seems to have been mildly cruel and annoying - though, in retrospect, she's the most normal and reasonable adult in the book.

(Kayla E. doesn't name her other family members at all - they're just "brother," "mother," "father." And she has since entirely separated from all of them, quite reasonably.)

OK. So here's Number One: that mother has some kind of untreated mental illness. Maybe narcissism, maybe something else similar. She's massively selfish, obsessive, mercurial, demanding, flighty, suicidal. Young Kayla was parenting her mother from a very young age. (The mother, and maybe the father as well, was also some variety of reactionary loony Christian, but I've already said she grew up in Texas.)

Number Two: her father seemingly never related to young Kayla as a human being or as his own daughter, but just a female body - comparing her curves to adult women, complaining she was too fat in puberty, putting her on fad diets. Young Kayla was mistaken for his wife on multiple occasions, I think starting when she was shockingly young for that assumption. 

Number Three: her brother molested her regularly, on those visits to the father's house, for years, starting pre-puberty. She seems to have told both her parents, who shrugged and told her that these things happen: either it was just normal or it was her fault.

Coming through all of that, she started to steal drinks, and was a full-blown alcoholic by puberty. That's Number Four.

They're not separate things - the father's disdain and brother's creeping meant visiting their house was even worse than life with her mother, which pushed her deeper into parenting her parent, and into spiraling into alcoholism. They all interlock, all three members of her closest family deeply horrible in different ways.

Precious Rubbish is not the story of how young Kayla got out or got better. There's too much material for that. Kayla E. may get to that story at some point, but this is all still on the level of processing the pain. The strips mostly depict young Kayla: she draws herself as ugly, since they all told her she was ugly.

There are some longer strips here, multi-pagers - usually with two levels of narrative, to mirror the dissociation young Kayla was later diagnosed with - that explain in more depth what happened. But it's mostly moments, either symbolic or realistic, all in a crisp, clean-line mid-century art style reminiscent of Peanuts or Little Lulu or similar sixty-year-old Dell comics. And the reader doesn't quite connect all of those dots for a while. It's clear this was a bad childhood, but it was bad in so many different dimensions simultaneously that it takes Kayla E. a while, in this circling, mosaic fashion, to get to all of them and show what they did to her younger self.

Precious Rubbish has powerful moments, and is full of arresting pages of comics. It is inventive and fearless, taking risks with style and layout, including pages of word games and "text features" reminiscent of those old kids' comics. And it does have a core central truth, that it circles and tells from every side. But it's not quite a single coherent book; it remains a collection of "Precious Rubbish" pieces rather than transforming them into something unified. Perhaps Kayla E. didn't want to do that in the first place: this is a book about brokenness, dissociation, damage. It's only right that a book like that not be a single unbroken thing. It is powerful and steadfast, in all its multifariousness, a shattered image of a childhood no one would wish on any child.