Gun Crazy

I've been slowly writing a memoir about my unremarkable childhood. The writing has gone on for quite a few years, not because it's painful or because I can't remember. I remember everything. It's not as if I have any buried monsters to exorcise in a rush of creativity. I've complained to my parents over the years about my upbringing. How, if they'd been more horrible to me, I might be a successful author today. But unlike Kipling's parents and Dickens's, my mom and dad were very nice people, tolerant, forgiving, pleasant to be around, encouraging, attentive. A person works with what they're given and if they are given a pleasant childhood, I guess they move naturally into a pleasant adulthood drawing pictures. The only thing violent about my youth is the contrast with the violence I saw and we still see on television and in movies, and wherever folks now walk fully armed like western hombres. One of the chapters of this memoir, published today by the Paris Review, was written a few years ago in a fond reverie but the story seems ironically, and sadly apt in the wake of each new outburst of mass gun killing. Looking back I can barely recognize my nine year-old self.

Climbing Trees

I watched an old home movie last week and there was one scene of a kid fifty feet up a hickory tree; myself at age nine. I was always climbing trees. With three children, my parents obviously were not terribly concerned. I was a spare. I'd given it up years before the New Yorker called me to do this illustration, but my familiarity with the sport (can I call it a sport?) made the assignment a felicitous one. There are actually tree climbing competitions, apparently. Wish I'd known this when I was nine. I think what makes the illustration work was my decision to render the tree in black and white. Black and white makes colors more colorful. Owen Philips art directed.