I'M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER

Vivid pictures from a gay life.

In an honest, often self-deprecating coming-of-age graphic memoir, Canadian cartoonist and illustrator Vellekoop recounts growing up gay in 1970s Toronto, where his family was a member of the conservative Christian Reformed Church, which viewed homosexuality as a sin. As a young boy, Vellekoop was passionately in love with his mother, treasuring their outings to department stores and lunches and helping her in the beauty salon she ran in the basement. He feared his father, who was given to unpredictable rages; surprising to the young Maurice, his father took him to see Fantasia, which incited an obsession with all things Disney. The author recalls his love of 1960s TV sitcoms, Barbie dolls, and Carol Burnett. He preferred watching TV to doing anything else; like his siblings, he was bad at sports. He wasn’t much of a reader, either, but when his mother introduced him to C.S. Lewis, he became enraptured by the Narnia books. Vellekoop structures his memoir in short chapters, each focused on a particular period in his life: teenage angst; finding a welcoming cohort in art school; career highs and lows; and many episodes of “fumbled romance.” Throughout, he pictures himself with two competing angels on his shoulders: one steering him to be good, kind, and compassionate; the other, cynical and bitter, intensifying his feelings of darkness. In 1995, seeing himself as a “smart, urban homosexual” who had outgrown Toronto, he moved to Manhattan. Although he had an agent and was gaining attention for his work—Vogue, for example, sent him to cover Paris couture—his personal life was difficult. He drank too much, fell into recurring depressions, and lost friends to AIDS. When he finally decided to get therapy, he struggled to find someone who could help him—and, after finally succeeding, he turned his life around.

A raw, revealing chronicle.