Acne is a memoir from television writer and actor Laura Chinn. Laura is such a great storyteller. She’s insightful, funny, and has lived through some real trauma. All the ingredients for an excellent read.
I loved the book from the moment I heard the title. It felt immediately relatable but also uncomfortable. I wanted to come up with a cover that would garner the same reaction.
Pathological is a memoir that tells the story of the factors that led to, and then consequences and aftermath of, the six misdiagnoses Sarah Fay received over a twenty-five year period (anorexia, major depression disorder, anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder). The standard method used to diagnose these disorders is massively flawed, and Sarah launches a deep investigation to expose the truth.
“I love you as high as the sky, and as deep as the ocean”, Kat Chow’s mother used to tell her and her sisters, quoting from the children’s book Owly. Originally titled As Deep as the Ocean, later renamed Seeing Ghosts, Chow’s memoir is about the matching depths of love and grief. For Chow, grief came too soon after love when at thirteen her mother died suddenly from cancer. What follows is the telling of a Chinese-American family mourning in the cracks between two cultures. It is ancestral rituals lost in translation for a child of immigrants and a loss that was never going to make sense in any language.
Summing up Vanessa Springora’s experience in a singular, all-encompassing graphic was a daunting task. Already an international literary sensation, Consent is an exposé on power, trauma and recovery. My personal design standards were higher than usual, and my canvas blank longer than usual.
The first directions I initially explored fell short. Butterflies - a nod to Nabokov - carried little emotional weight for this particular package.
Back in 2014, writer Mira Jacob's six-year-old son Z became obsessed with Michael Jackson. He wanted to dance like Michael, he wanted to look like Michael, and what began as Z's questions about his pop-star obsession spread into deeper questions about skin and color and race and family. Jacob is East Indian and her husband is Jewish, and Z wanted to understand who he was.
When Z learned about the killing of Michael Brown, a black man shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the questions grew more complex, and carried fear.
