What It Is By Lynda Barry

What It Is By Lynda Barry: The Practical Reality

What It Is By Lynda Barry is a graphic memoir published in 2008. It covers her childhood through college, starting with her memories from when she was very young. The book is structured as a series of drawings and narrative text. It won the Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication. That detail matters because it signals what the book actually is before you pick it up. I picked up a copy in 2015, probably three years after it came out, and read it straight through in a weekend. I'm not going to tell you it changed my life. It did not change my life. It is a book about a person dealing with difficult circumstances, drawn in a way that can feel loose and spontaneous. Barry uses comic panels, hand-lettered text, and a visual style that looks almost childish on purpose. The style is deliberate. That is the first thing to understand before you judge it.

What It Is By Lynda Barry and Why People Keep Talking About It

The book deals with Barry's early memories of her mother, her upbringing in the 1950s, poverty, abuse, and her eventual turn toward cartooning. She writes about how she learned to draw from her own experiences. She structures the memoir around the idea of creating from nothing. The technique she describes is basically taking a blank page and putting something on it without worrying about whether it is good. Here is the part most reviews skip over. What It Is is not just a memoir. It is also an instruction manual for people who want to make art and feel like they cannot. Barry embeds exercises throughout the pages. She asks the reader to do things. Stop reading. Look at your hands. Draw them. This is unusual for a memoir. It means the book operates on two levels at once. When I first tried the exercises, I ran into a problem. I would read a page, get to an exercise, and then immediately start second-guessing myself. The drawings looked wrong. I put the book down. This happened twice before I figured out that the point of the exercises is not to produce good drawings. The point is to bypass the internal editor. I started working through the exercises faster, without stopping to evaluate the output. That changed everything about how I engaged with the material. It took me about ten minutes to realize that was the issue, honestly.

The core method Barry advocates is something she calls "the story street" or generating content from pure memory without filtering. You write or draw the first thing that comes up. Do not revise. Do not plan. This is straightforward to describe and genuinely difficult to do consistently. Most people, myself included, will start self-censoring within the first thirty seconds of any exercise. The workaround I found was setting a timer for three minutes and not looking back at what I produced until the timer went off. That cut the hesitation time dramatically. There are some things about this approach that Barry herself admits and other things that become obvious through use. The method works well for generating raw material. It does not work well for producing a polished final piece. If you are looking for a technique to create a finished product, this is not it. The book gives you fuel. It does not give you an engine. One counter-intuitive detail that beginners miss is that the visual style on the page is part of the argument. Barry draws in a simplified, almost naive style intentionally. She does this to make the act of creation feel accessible. People who are intimidated by art often think they need technical skill to begin. Barry demonstrates that technical skill is secondary to the impulse to make marks. Her drawings are not simple because she cannot do better. They are simple because the book's thesis is that anyone can start anywhere.

Another nuance is that the memoir portions are not always reliable. Barry acknowledges this. Some of her earliest memories are presented as they feel, not as they factually occurred. She reconstructs scenes from when she was five or six years old. That is inherently speculative. A few reviewers called this out as a weakness. I would call it a feature of the form. The book is about memory and feeling, not historical documentation. Treating it as a factual record misses the point entirely. I should mention one limitation that comes up repeatedly. The exercise-based structure works if you are working alone or in a workshop setting. It is less effective if you are reading passively without actually doing the prompts. I know this because I tried both ways. The first pass, I read it like a regular book. The second pass, I did every exercise, and the experience was completely different. The book demands participation. It does not reward passive consumption. There is also the question of tone. The book deals with serious subject matter: an alcoholic mother, poverty, physical abuse. The humor is genuine but dark. Some readers find the tonal shifts jarring. The transitions between funny cartoon sequences and heavier narrative passages can feel abrupt. This is not a flaw. It is accurate to the way memory and trauma actually work. But if you are looking for a consistent emotional register, you will not find it here.

If you want something similar that leans more heavily into the craft side, you might look at Making Comics, also by Lynda Barry. That book is more focused on technique. What It Is is the memoir version with embedded prompts. They complement each other but serve different purposes. The book is widely available. It is in print, in paperback, and in libraries. I have not found a legitimate free digital edition, and searches for pirated PDFs tend to lead to sketchy sites with malware. It is not expensive. A used copy usually runs under fifteen dollars. New copies are around eighteen to twenty-five depending on the retailer. What It Is By Lynda Barry is not a perfect book. It is not for everyone. People who want straightforward memoir or people who want pure instruction will find it frustrating. It sits in the middle. It worked for me because I was in a place where I needed permission to start something without caring if it was good. The book gives you that permission and a few exercises to practice on. That is basically all it is and all it ever promised to be.