“Ghosts,” the new book by Raina Telgemeier, graphic novelist extraordinaire, comes out today. Telgemeier’s realistic, sometimes autobiographical books have helped popularize graphic novels for middle-schoolers, in a big way. Her past three books, “Smile,” from 2010, “Drama,” from 2012, and “Sisters,” from 2014, were all No. 1 Times best-sellers. She has won two Eisner awards and many other distinctions. This morning, “Ghosts” was already No. 13, out of all books, on Amazon’s best-seller list. Kids first got to know Telgemeier through her four adaptations of Baby-Sitters Club books, by Ann M. Martin, but her original work, with sensitive observations, flawed protagonists, and funny details, resonates in a more personal way. “Smile,” whose plot a ten-year-old fan once described to me in exacting, grisly detail, is about Telgemeier’s dental misadventures in junior high and high school, which began when she fell and knocked out one top front tooth and knocked in another. (“WHAM!,” the panel says.) “Sisters” is about young Raina’s relationship with her boisterous little sister, Amara; “Drama” is about drama in a middle-school drama club. “Ghosts” is, in some ways, a big departure: it’s about ghosts.
Writing magic realism “snuck up on me,” Telgemeier told me recently. “I was really happy and comfortable writing autobio. Even striking out into realistic fiction, with ‘Drama,’ felt like a stretch.” She had never been drawn to fantasy. As a child, she liked real-world stuff: in addition to classic stories, a series “about how to be polite to your neighbors, how to talk to your elders, what to do when you encounter a problem. I was really interested in this idea that kids can have problems, too, and here’s how to solve them.” She gravitated toward Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beverly Cleary. She loved “A Girl from Yamhill,” Cleary’s memoir of youth. “Reading about her actual childhood was just as interesting to me as reading about Ramona’s childhood,” she said. Her favorite book of all time is “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” one of the great rodent-centered works of children’s literature, which, like “Stuart Little” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle,” is extremely realistic, with a few key exceptions.
Telgemeier’s taste in comics tends toward realism, too. She first discovered comics in the newspaper and quickly became insatiable. “It brought one of my favorite things, which was drawing, and my other favorite thing, which was books, into one space: it was completely illustrated stories. And I just loved them. Part of the appeal for me was that every morning I would wake up and I’d get to see what was going on with my friends in the paper.” Her early comics were “basically a big rip-off of ‘For Better or for Worse,’ ” by Lynn Johnston, she said. She admired the way “all these real and important and serious and tragic things happened to the characters,” and that Johnston could always “turn it into something to make you smile at the end. It kind of gave me that perspective on life, too.” She tried to replicate this comic style herself. “It didn’t play well to my fifth-grade class,” she said. Current fifth graders are a different story.
“Ghosts” starts off in a familiar milieu. Catrina is the tween protagonist; she’s riding in a car with her mother, father, and little sister, Maya, a boisterous, happy kid who has cystic fibrosis and is an extremely good sport about it. They’re moving from Southern California to the foggy, windswept town of Bahía de la Luna, in Northern California, where the sun shines for only sixty-two days a year; the ocean breezes will be good for Maya’s health. On a walk after they first arrive, Cat and Maya encounter great cliffs looking onto the ocean, misty vistas, a fanciful, empty beachside arcade with a cute boy inside. His name is Carlos, and he likes to talk about ghosts—the whole town, it turns out, likes to talk about ghosts. Cat doesn’t want to hear it. (I’m with you, kid.) As the story unfolds, it interweaves Cat’s fears about school, ghosts, and Maya’s health; actual problems with Maya’s health; and Maya’s perhaps overly mature worry that Cat won’t be able to deal with her eventual death.
Telgemeier’s style is plainspoken and sophisticated at once. The dialogue is easy to read; the panels vibrate with comic-strip noises like “shooka shooka shooka,” “VRRRR,” and “SHOOF!” The characters look like people we might see in the funnies; the landscapes are extraordinary. Her work is emotionally resonant, revealing small, significant moments and making use of silent panels, in which pain, joy, or wonder sink in. Wind, water, and even the swooping lines of some dialogue balloons, Maya’s breathing tube, and sound-effect words waving across panels can have a ghostly aesthetic. The book’s colorist, Braden Lamb, makes evocative use of rich, muted colors—indigos, olives, oranges, teals.
Having read Telgemeier’s very realistic first three books—full of crush-worthy boys, orthodontist appointments, Girl Scout meetings, back-seat squabbles, and gentle lessons about self-respect, empathy, being who you are, and doing what you love—I began reading “Ghosts” thinking that the ghosts would be metaphorical, an imaginative rendering of childhood fears. When they showed up in an abandoned mission, looking like modified Caspers or Shmoos, I thought that they might be breezes, or illusions. But then they morphed into skeleton shapes and began to interact.
Even so, “Ghosts” is rooted in real-life detail. Like the fictional Bahía de la Luna, its inspiration, Half Moon Bay, California, is a “quiet, windy, beachy town: lots of fog, but it’s also got lots of pumpkin farms,” Telgemeier said. “So you get the Halloween pumpkin patch, and a pumpkin festival every year that people go to for fun.” Unlike the Northeast, the region often depicted in Halloween imagery, the Bay Area isn’t all red and orange leaves and harvest moons: it’s when the fog lifts. “That’s when the sun starts to shine and people come out of their houses,” she said. “And one of the things we do is go to the pumpkin patch.” It’s a cheerful time of year, in contrast with “the gloom that sits over the city in the summertime. It’s not something people that don’t live here are necessarily aware of. That, to me, ties into writing autobiography, which is, This is my experience—something that I’m familiar with—and you might not have that experience. I’m going to tell you what it’s like, and you’re going to go, ‘Huh! Interesting.’ ”
“Ghosts” was inspired in part by Telgemeier’s young cousin Sabina, who died of cancer at thirteen; in the book, a note on a tree at a Day of the Dead celebration says, “To Sabina We ♥ U Tu Familia.” The story incorporates ofrendas (offerings on altars to departed family members); tensions between tradition and assimilation; metaphors about breath, air, wind, life, and death. Cat learns to cope with her anxieties both by embracing the unknown and by connecting to friends and family. (And, near the end, by giving Carlos a peck on the cheek.) The lovely ending scene, which I won’t spoil, surprised me with its emotional power.
Telgemeier does not have Mexican heritage; her knowledge of Mexican culture comes from her experiences with Mexican friends and relatives. Her experience of attending San Francisco’s annual Day of the Dead celebration, last year, in addition to being “fun, exciting, intriguing, interesting, and beautiful,” was “very respectful, calm, and wistful,” she said. “It felt like everybody was there for their own particular reason. But at the same time you’re sharing it with everybody else. So there’s sort of just like quiet awe and joy. I was really grateful to be able to stop and sit down and pull my sketchbook out and be in the moment. It ended up as being one of the most moving nights of my life.” She had left a page or two blank in the draft of “Ghosts” in anticipation of going to the event. “As soon as I went, I realized I needed to add several pages,” she said. (Her editors were kind about it, she said.) She took several weeks to process the experience. “What Cat sees in that scene is absolutely what I saw that night myself,” she said. (Minus the ghosts.)
Telgemeier does not believe in ghosts. “But I do believe in memories,” she said. “And I think memories are a very, very powerful force. I also believe that everybody should and gets to believe in whatever they want to. Believing in something comforting rather than frightening is a wonderful idea.” She said that, though she writes her books to answer questions, “it’s also important to ask a few questions that are going to remain unanswered.”
Kids write to her all the time, and talk to her like a friend. “They don’t always make the connection that I’m also a grownup,” she said. (She is thirty-nine.) “When they realize that I’m their parents’ age, it basically sends them to an existential place.” They ask her for answers to their personal questions, talking as if they know each other, and she feels a responsibility not talk to them that way. She doesn’t feel that she’s in a position to give readers personal advice. “But I’m more aware than ever of what I want to say to kids through my books,” she said. What do you want to say to kids? I asked.
“That it’s going to be O.K,” she said. “That everybody, with just a little bit of talking and a little bit of empathy, can find out that they have a lot in common.” Her next book will deliver that message in a more earthly form: memoir.
