In Person

The pleasure of people, lost and found.

In 2020 my family huddled inside trying to be good while everything outside seemed very, very bad. My husband and I passed our children back and forth between us as he worked full time and I desperately strove to hit my deadline of turning in the final pages for my graphic memoir, Passport. I resolved to practice radical gratitude and tried to keep it all in perspective. I would comfort myself: the enforced isolation was good for book making and bonding with my new baby. Our children were young, young enough that this would hardly register in their memories let alone affect their education. And at least my book wasn’t coming out this dreadful year, but the next. By 2021 all would surely be back to normal … right?

But of course things were not back to normal, not for the world and not for me. Everything I had imagined happening around my book’s release was either altered by the persistent constraints of the pandemic or colored by my father’s sudden passing. In person events were not a possibility: I signed books in an empty room at BookPeople (Austin’s amazing indie bookstore) wearing a mask, all alone. I was beyond thrilled when I was interviewed by Scott Simon on NPR for Passport, but I was also deeply saddened knowing that the person it would have thrilled the most would have been my dad. This sadness bordered on bitterness. It seemed unfair that after a lifetime of listening to NPR (or as he called it, “the slow news”) he missed out on hearing his kid on the radio by a matter of months.

More than one person that first year asked me “Are you sad he won’t get to read it?” And I was defiant at first: “Not at all! He died knowing what I had done and I knew he was proud of me.” And that was true. But it was also true that I had scrambled in those last weeks of his life, once we realized he really was dying, to ask for special permission from my publisher to share an un-copyedited PDF of Passport with him. But by then of course he was too sick to read anything. One day, a few months before the book’s release, I broke down in public and sobbed wildly into my husband’s shoulder asking “What’s the point if he’s not here to see any of it?”

It won’t surprise anyone who has read Before We Wake that I turned around and poured a lot of these complicated feelings into another book. It took me about 5 years to make Passport and I promised myself I would work faster this time around. All in all Before We Wake took me … about five years as well.

So I find myself here in 2026 with a new book in yet another new world. A world where I can have events in real bookstores with real people. Obviously my dad is still dead and I still miss him. I always will. But I created some sort of alchemy when I took my dreams and my grief and fashioned them into Alicia and Quintin’s love story. I knew I always wanted to write a story about shared consciousness, and lucid dreaming, and the magical power of love. But before I started writing it I didn’t know it was also about grief, and dads, and trees.

Last week, wearing a dress made for my mother and a jacket that was once my father’s, I sat in BookPeople once again, this time in a room full of people, and I got to look them in the eye as I signed their books. Traveling seems impossibly glamorous, and talking to people in person feels like a gift. I luxuriate in the fact that I got to cobble together a book tour this time around and that wherever I go I get to bring my dad with me too.

The pleasure that eluded me in 2021 feels deeply precious now. I am so grateful for everyone who has come out and supported Before We Wake and celebrated comics and patronized the wonderful stores that are so dedicated to readers. Here is where I will be next. I hope to see you in person.

Saturday, May 9th 2026 6pm
Author Talk at Bard’s Alley, Vienna, VA

Thursday, May 14th 2026
Fantom Comics, Washington DC

Saturday, May 2nd & Sunday May 3rd 2026
Little Shop of Stories Book Festival
Decatur, GA

Saturday, June 11th 2026
Third Eye Comics, Annapolis, MD