May 25, 2009
In this delightfully composed graphic novel, journalist Sandell (Glamour
) illustrates a touchingly youthful story about a daughter's gushing love for her father. Using a winning mixture of straightforward comic-book illustrations with a first-person diarylike commentary, Sandell recounts the gradual realization from her young adulthood onward that her charming, larger-than-life Argentine father, bragging of war metals, degrees from prestigious universities and acquaintances with famous people, had lied egregiously to his family about his past and accomplishments. Growing up with her two younger sisters and parents first in California, then in Bronxville, N.Y., the author records signs along the way that her father, a professor of economics with a volatile temperament and autocratic manner, was hiding something, from his inexplicable trips out of town, increasing paranoid isolation, early name change from Schmidt to Sandell, to massive credit-card fraud. Interviewing her father for her first magazine article, the author resolved to check his sources and even flew later to confront his past in Argentina, only to discover the truth. Feeling betrayed, guilty for exposing him and mistrustful in her relationships with men, Sandell numbed herself by abusing Ambien and alcohol. Her depiction of her rehab adventure is rather pat and tidy, and she does not address the notion that her own creativity might have sprung from her father's very duplicity. However, Sandell's method of storytelling is marvelously unique and will surely spark imitators.
May 15, 2009
Glamour contributing editor Sandell specializes in celebrity profiles and personal essays, yet as she documents in this narrative, many of those she profiled found her story far more interesting than their own—and no wonder.
Her candid work is not particularly notable as a graphic memoir—the art has a childlike innocence but is otherwise unremarkable. It bears closer kinship to Mary Karr's classic The Liars' Club (1995) in its portrait of the lasting effects of a disorienting childhood. Sandell initially worshipped her Argentine father, then came to distrust him on practically every level. She chronicles her struggle to free herself from his psychological pull in order to become a fully functioning human being. The memoir opens with her as a girl accepting everything her father told her: about his genius, about his mysterious multiple identities, about the academic jobs he left for ones that didn't seem quite as good. Yet she wondered why he received mail in various names and stopped delivery when he was gone for even a day or two, and why she often picked up the phone to hear someone asking for a name she didn't know. Even scarier was the sense that her father was perhaps turning her into a bit of an imposter herself. She began to distance herself from him in adolescence and early adulthood, but the damage had been done. Unable to have a fulfilling relationship with a man, she toyed with lesbianism. She became increasingly alcoholic and addicted to Ambien, conducting both her professional and personal lives in a sort of functioning numbness that she eventually realized was mostly numb and not so much functioning. A romantic relationship that she did her best to sabotage and further inquiry into the truth about her father's life—which he did his best to sabotage—finally led her to recovery.
A revealing, powerfully strange graphic memoir.
(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
July 1, 2009
Normally an interviewer of celebrities for Glamour, GQ, New York, and the like, Sandell here essays a graphic-novel memoir focused on her mysterious, near-megalomaniacal father. Her gifts for constructing a compelling narrative with highly emotional building blocks, providing perspective and shading (literally) with engaging and expressive images, and baring her own weaknesses make it insightful and dramatic. She begins showing us the father of her earliest memories, full of exciting stories of intellectual successes and international adventures. She moves on to her dawning doubt about his veracity, a development spurred by learning he has opened and abused credit accounts in her name. She takes us through her own third decade, bravely taking blame for slights she visited on her family early on and while researching her fathers lies and for her difficulties with friends and lovers. As she matures in the book, her drawing increases in clarity with her understanding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)