Barry, Lynda (Jean) 1956-

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BARRY, Lynda (Jean) 1956-

PERSONAL: Born January 2, 1956, in Richland Center, WI. Education: Graduated from Evergreen State College, c. 1978.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Sasquatch Books, Suite 260, 615 Second Ave., Seattle, WA 98104.

CAREER: Artist, author, and playwright. Commentator for National Public Radio; guest on television programs, including Late Night with David Letterman. Exhibitions include "Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!," Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA, 1984, and "The Good Times Are Killing Me," Linda Farris Gallery, 1986.

AWARDS, HONORS: Alex Award, Young Adult Library Services Association, 2003, for One Hundred Demons.

WRITINGS:

COMICS

Girls + Boys, Real Comet Press (Seattle, WA), 1981.

Big Ideas, Real Comet Press (Seattle, WA), 1983.

Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, Real Comet Press (Seattle, WA), 1984.

Everything in the World, Perennial Library (New York, NY), 1986.

The Fun House, Perennial Library (New York, NY), 1987.

Down the Street, Perennial Library (New York, NY), 1988.

Come over, Come Over, Harper Perennial (New York, NY), 1990.

My Perfect Life, Harper Perennial (New York, NY), 1992.

It's So Magic, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

The Freddie Stories, Sasquatch Books (Seattle, WA), 1999.

The Greatest of Marlys, Sasquatch Books (Seattle, WA), 2000.

One Hundred Demons, Sasquatch Books (Seattle, WA), 2002.

Contributor of cartoon strips "Girls and Boys," "Ernie Pook's Comeek," and "Modern Romance;" to periodicals, including Esquire (1984-89), Village Voice, New York Times, and Raw.

OTHER

The Last House (play), produced by Pioneer Square Theater, Seattle, WA, 1988.

The Good Times Are Killing Me (novel), Real Comet Press (Seattle, WA), 1988, with new illustrations, Sasquatch Books (Seattle, WA), 1998.

(With Arnold Aprill) The Good Times Are Killing Me (play; adapted from her novel), first produced in Chicago, IL, 1989, produced Off-Broadway, 1991.

Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1999.

Contributor of articles and book reviews to periodicals, including American Film, Life, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and New York Times. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including a monthly fiction column for Mother Jones, 1989—.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A sequel to the novel The Good Times Are Killing Me, showing Edna from ages twelve to thirteen; plans for a screenplay adaptation of The Good Times Are Killing Me and for a musical.

SIDELIGHTS: "Imagine having a job like mine where you sit around all day and think about dirt bombs!," commented Lynda Barry in the San Jose Mercury News. In such writings as her "Ernie Pook" comic strip and the novel-turned-play, The Good Times Are Killing Me, Barry ranges over the whole comic/tragic experience of growing up, from dirt bombs to divorced parents to the strains that pull friendships apart. The lives of young people, Barry suggests, offer major insights about life in general. "I think about my own childhood all the time," she told an interviewer for the Los Angeles Times. "It's the only place to go if you're looking for answers. It's where all our motivations, feelings and opinions come from."

While many adults prefer to remember their youth as a "simpler" time, Barry grew up knowing that life is complicated. She was born in a small Wisconsin town into a multicultural family, daughter of a Filipino mother and a Norwegian-Irish father. Her mother soon felt out of place in the Midwest, so the family moved to Seattle, Washington, where her father felt out of place—surrounded by Filipino in-laws who could not speak English. Though Barry inherited her father's European looks—"Norwegian blood," she told the Chicago Sun-Times, "can suck the color out of anything"—she was received as a fellow Filipino by her mother's relatives, who talked to her routinely about "white" people. "I never felt completely Filipino and I never felt completely white," she told the San Jose Mercury News. "I felt completely different. I didn't even feel like a girl; I didn't feel like a boy, either. I could not find a peer."

Barry settled as best she could into her new neighborhood—the multiracial, working-class south end of Seattle, where dozens of her Filipino relatives lived. Music became one of the joys of her life. "Filipinos are really cool people. They have a tradition of a lot of dancing, a lot of group activity," Barry recalled in the Chicago Sun-Times. "The radio's always going, there's always music playing. We had our record player in the kitchen, which was the center of where people sat around and hung out. They were always listening to the hippest things. Still, to this day, my aunts and uncles listen to Top 40. They listen to the same music kids do." Also in the kitchen was her "exuberant" Filipino grandmother, who served up delicious potfuls of chicken adobo, boiled in vinegar and soy sauce. "I worship and adore her," Barry wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "because she has made my life incredibly rich."

Despite the vitality exhibited by her family, life was never easy. Money was tight, and her parents eventually broke up. She started to realize that society was not very equitable, and that her family had to struggle more than most. Nevertheless, Barry became the first in her family to attend college and enrolled at Evergreen State, where her goal, as she told the New York Times, was "to be the best, the most depressed, bohemian in the world and make the most serious paintings." Being cast off by a boyfriend changed her life. "I couldn't sleep, going through my first heartbreak, and I drew a lot of comics about women and men," she told Mother Jones. "The men were cactuses who would talk to women and say, you know, 'Come to bed with me' and stuff. And a lot of them were friendly, too. It was just that they would be really bad to lay [sic] on top of." She called her drawings "Spinal Comics" and, for all the pointy spines, men seemed to like them as well as women. Eventually her work would become known as "Ernie Pook's Comeek," in honor of her little brother, who liked to call everything he owned by that name.

One of Barry's earliest fans was the editor of the Evergreen school paper, Matt Groening, who went on to fame as the creator of "Life in Hell" comics and The Simpsons television series. "Lynda's stuff," he told the Washington Post, "was funny, wild, had a very strong point of view, and it was obviously what Lynda thought was funny." Soon Barry's work was appearing in the papers at Evergreen State and the University of Washington.

Barry had qualms about switching her focus from painting to cartoons, but a nasty boss made up Barry's mind for her. "I had a job selling popcorn in a movie theater when I was twenty-one," she told the New York Daily News, "and then they found out I could draw and so I started doing paste-up for their little ads. I worked really hard. One day my boss came in—he was an alcoholic, I hated him—and his highball breath was blowing on me and he told me I was skating on thin ice. And I thought, 'This is what having a job is all about. That you can be alone in a room working hard on something you don't care about and a complete ass can come in and blow his nasty breath on you and tell you you're skating on thin ice.'" She promptly quit and, on the bus home, wrote a pledge to herself that she would never work for anyone ever again.

Fresh out of college in the late 1970s, Barry did not have much of a cartooning career except continued appearances in the University of Washington Daily and ten dollars a week from the Seattle Sun—a struggling alternative paper that finally went out of business. Just as she was ready to give up, her friendship with Groening helped to save her. Groening, himself a struggling cartoonist/writer in Los Angeles, wrote an article describing his friends in the "Evergreen mafia" that came to the attention of Bob Roth, publisher of the thriving alternative weekly the Chicago Reader. Roth liked Barry's work. "She was drawing a hipper kind of strip that you couldn't find anywhere else," he told the San Jose Mercury News. "She was addressing adult concerns in a way that comic strips almost never do." Barry liked Roth's offer of eighty dollars a week—at last she could live. "I had a telephone answering machine," she observed, "and for the next year, whenever Roth called I wouldn't pick up the phone because I was too scared he would fire me."

By the early 1980s, Barry's comic strip was ensconced in alternative weeklies nationwide. She had stopped drawing men as spiny plants, but she remained interested in male-female relationships—"the whole luuuv thang," as she was quoted in the Seattle Times. In strips that were later collected in the volumes Girls + Boys, Big Ideas, and Everything in the World, she satirized dating, parties, fashions, two-faced boyfriends, and the illusions of romance. She became known for quips such as "Cupid is a monster from hell" and "Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke"; interviewers likened her live delivery to that of a stand-up comedian. "Cupid is a monster," Barry explained in Interview, "because he shoots you and then you suddenly have to do all these things that you ordinarily wouldn't do. To operate a car you must have a driver's license. Love is a hundred times more dangerous than driving a car and you do it completely unprepared. You can fall in love with anybody, even people who hit you or steal your money or make you feel like you have a giant butt."

To satirize popular culture, Barry studied it avidly, poring through magazines, catalogs, and even junk mail. "Basically there is no idea too small," she told Interview. She became an accomplished eavesdropper: overheard conversations were not only a source of subject matter, but a way to understand how people actually talk. She visited singles bars a lot—for business reasons. "I go there with my boyfriend," she explained, "who is very good at making me look occupied, but not saying much, so I can eavesdrop." By 1984 Barry was supplementing her weekly newspaper strip with a monthly "Modern Romance" strip she wrote especially for Esquire magazine. "Her screwy depictions of the mating game," wrote Margot Sims in Mother Jones,"are so dead-on they make you cringe."

A favorite target of Barry's barbs became what sociologists call "women's body image": specifically, the difference between the glamour that society expects women to exude and their actual appearance. Her pop culture studies gave her plenty of ammunition. "Magazines like Cosmopolitan . . . really capitalize on women feeling horrible about themselves," Barry told Interview. "They resemble porno magazines. . . . You're supposed to look at the pictures of models standing around with no clothes on trying to look as sexy as possible and think to yourself, 'Oh, that's me looking like that for so-and-so.' Women yell about Playboy for its sexist treatment of women, while Glamour and Mademoiselle slip under the rug, no sweat. Women's magazines are as guilty, if not more so, of creating an image of how women think they should be." False expectations were deeply entrenched, going back all the way to childhood. "Girls have an idea of how their bodies should be," said Barry in Ms."They don't play with their Barbie dolls because they are looking for intellectual idols."

Barry created her own gallery of more authentic women. In Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, she uses a coloring-book format to present cartoon portraits of dozens of different (undressed) women, including fashionable women, fat women, anorexic women, and a groggy woman with curlers in her hair wearing "Foxy Lady" underwear. Along with the pictures is a first-person narrative in which an adolescent girl describes the uneasy blossoming of her own sexuality. "We got Bras and they got Jock Straps," the narrator recalls of her school days. "Like everything was suddenly going out of control and your mom had to buy you something to stop it."

The book was another daring move for Barry. Friends warned her against it; some feminists criticized it; some pornographers liked it. "I couldn't figure out who was going to kill me—the Moral Majority or the lesbian separatists," Barry told Ms. "But the thing that surprised me most was that it seemed to work on enough levels that everyone saw it totally differently, and most found a reason to like it." Wrote B. Ruby Rich in the Voice Literary Supplement: "Barry stakes her position not on the good or bad essence of sexuality, but rather on the tragicomic inevitability of it all, traumas and yearnings included. It is a testimony to her skill that she confronts so complicated a subject in so simple a format."

Meanwhile, Barry had mixed feelings about her work for Esquire, even if it did help her become more widely known. Unlike her usual comic strips, in which she followed her own creative instincts, "Modern Romance" was made to order for a particular audience—Esquire's affluent, young, male readers. The stories were not supposed to be whimsical or darkly satirical; they had to be quick, lively, and unambiguously funny. At first Barry tried to take the assignment in stride, viewing it as chance to develop her versatility. "I really like being in Esquire because it is a man's magazine," she told Mother Jones."It makes me feel just like the girls in high school who would take electronics or machine shop. You know, you would take those classes not only because you wanted to learn about machines, but mostly because you wanted to be in there with the guys, and just kind of messing up their act, too." Eventually, though, the need to conform to someone else's ideas took its toll, and Barry discontinued the Esquire strip. "I had to work with an editor, whose job it was to make sure my cartoons conformed to the 'Esquire Man' way of looking at things," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Thing is, I don't see the world through the eyes of a successful, thirty-year-old white guy."

Instead of quips about modern romance, Barry increasingly wanted to express the concerns of growing up. The adolescent narrator of Naked Ladies! was her inspiration. "That was my first character, my first encounter with the fact that you can take a character and then they'll do all the work and you just sit behind them and jot down everything they're saying," she told the San Jose Mercury News. "To me it is simply a marvel that you could have various characters that speak in different voices!" By the time Barry produced the comic strips that appear in Down the Street, she had settled on four elementary schoolers for her focus: Arna, the sensitive, observant narrator; Arnold, her rowdy brother; Marlys, a cousin who is smart, self-assured, even bratty; and Freddie, brother of Marlys, who lives with the humiliating knowledge that his parents had him "by accident." "With those four characters," she told the Chicago Sun-Times, "you can pretty much tell any story."

Barry's work was not as predictably funny anymore. Along with Freddie's bug collection, Marlys's beauty makeovers, and Arnold's chewing-gum map of South America came narratives about child abuse, poverty, and the man at the candy store who had not said much to anyone since his wife left him. Some readers thought Barry was saying that childhood unhappiness was funny; some thought she was too depressing; others assumed the traumas were all autobiographical. The last assumption especially troubled Barry ("My God, what kind of life would I have had?" she remarked in the Seattle Times), and she ran disclaimers at the front of several of her books. A few papers canceled the strip. For a while Barry was worried. "You always have fears of pushing your audience away," she told the San Jose Mercury News. "If you made your reputation doing these sorts of snappy jokes about relationships and then you move into some other field, you're going to definitely lose a lot of people who feel there's something wrong with you. And then I'm going to wonder whether there's something wrong with me. But there's really no choice," she said. "When I found a story that I thought was so good and so authentic, I wasn't going to write one about somebody eating hot dogs just because I was scared to send the stronger one out."

Why should a comic strip about children be painful at times? "Pain for kids is much sharper," Barry explained to the Chicago Tribune. "As a kid, you're stuck, no matter what's going on. As an adult, if you're at your friend's house and she and her boyfriend have a wild fight, you can leave. As a kid you can't." Wouldn't it be better to just forget about it? "It's important to go back and decide what happened back then," she said in the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch. "Making an adult decision about it really works wonders. . . . [As a child] when you're not invited to a party, you figure it's because you're a jerk, when really maybe the other kids just needed someone to boast to or you just lived in the wrong neighborhood. People do go through their lives hurt by these things. There's a beauty about reconciling it. It's like music; it has the same kind of power." Barry likened her strips to short stories, and increasingly observers agreed, describing her less as a cartoonist than as an author. "This isn't just a smart cartoon," wrote Katherine Dieckmann in the Voice Literary Supplement. "It's strong writing." In the long run, Barry's bold move to change her comic strip was amply rewarded. Fewer than twenty papers carried her work in 1983; five years later the number had grown to nearly fifty; she topped sixty in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile Barry had begun another ambitious project, inspired by a vision she had while driving through a pineapple field during a Hawaiian vacation. "I saw a series of portraits," she told the Los Angeles Times, "in funky metal frames, of my favorite musicians—most of them black, most of them dead. Suddenly, I knew what my next project would be." Using the bright, flat, multicolored style of American folk art, Barry created eighteen portraits of American musicians, ranging from pioneering blues singer Gertrude ("Ma") Rainey to soul singer Otis Redding. The paintings were exhibited at a Seattle gallery, which asked Barry to write a short introduction for the exhibition catalog.

She read up on the musicians, many of whom endured poverty and racial discrimination, and began to ponder how thoroughly racism had saturated American society. Determined to explain how closely the history of American music was intertwined with the history of American racism, Barry struggled with her essay for months without success. "[I] was telling instead of showing," she explained in the New York Daily News. Instead of finishing the essay, she decided to dramatize her concerns in a work of fiction, using the setting she knew best: the poor, interracial neighborhood where she had grown up. In particular, she told the New York Times, "I wanted to paint a picture of adolescence, because one of the things that's incredible about adolescence is that you start to see the problems of the world, and when they first hit, you think you know how to fix things."

The resulting novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me, is set in the 1960s and narrated by Edna Arkins, a white junior high school student looking back on her last year in elementary school. Edna's downscale neighborhood exemplifies the interracial tensions of the sixties: while the ideals of the civil rights era preached a new interracial harmony, whites were fleeing from the racially mixed inner cities as quickly as they could. "In the beginning of this street it was a mainly white street," Edna recalls. "The houses went White, White, White, Japanese, White, White. . . . Then it seemed like just about everybody kept moving out until now our street is Chinese, Negro, Negro, White, Japanese, Filipino." As the novel progresses, Edna describes her abortive friendship with Bonna Willis, a hip, assertive black girl from the nearby housing projects. The bridge between the two girls is music: Bonna has records she wants to play, and Edna is lucky enough to have a battered old record player. Their friendship blossoms as Bonna teaches Edna about black singers like James Brown and dances like the Tighten Up while the girls cavort in Edna's Record Player Nightclub—actually Edna's basement, redone in a sixth-grader's notion of glamour and style.

The girls' friendship is never free of tension. Edna's aunt, reeking with condescension, takes Bonna along on a family camping trip to acquaint her with the finer things in life (Bonna has been camping many times). Edna is utterly afraid when Bonna starts taking her on a tour of the housing projects. Things deteriorate further when Edna attends a slumber party from which black girls have been excluded, and the two girls start avoiding each other. Then comes the more grown-up, hostile world of junior high, where "from the second we walked through the doors we all automatically split apart into groups of who was alike. . . . This was our new main rule of life even though it wasn't us who created it. It just grew there, like big permanent teeth after baby teeth." Fights erupt. Edna gets pushed around in the girl's bathroom by one of Bonna's friends, then Edna blames Bonna, and Bonna smacks Edna. The friendship is over. "In the vice principal's office we acted like we had never met," Edna concludes. "Like all it was was any black girl slapping any white girl who had mouthed off to her, something that happened every single day and would just keep on happening world without end." "I really wanted to show how the problem of racism affects people for their entire lives," Barry told the New York Times. "Edna and Bonna are a couple of kids who became friends at a time when they each really needed a friend. And that need isn't about to stop. I wanted to make them the first casualties. Because it is a war. To me [Good Times is] a tragedy—or perhaps a feel-bad comedy."

Barry's novel brought her a new level of fame, including her first major critical notice. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Deborah Stead praised Barry's "impeccable ear" for Edna's way of speaking and declared: "This funny, intricate and finally heartbreaking story exquisitely captures an American childhood." The Good Times Are Killing Me also piqued the interest of the theater world, particularly Arnold Aprill, head of Chicago's City Lit Theater Company. After meeting with Barry, he roughed out a dramatic adaptation of the novel, and then Barry joined him to work with the cast and write a final script. The play debuted in Chicago in 1989, and then, after further rewriting by Barry, was produced Off-Broadway in 1991 and became a hit with audiences and theater critics alike. A writer for the New York Post praised its "masterly sense of progression, construction, and dramatic form." The Good Times Are Killing Me, the reviewer concluded, "hits us in places we had forgotten, and tells us things we never knew we knew." Some reviewers suggested that the play had too many short scenes—the result, they surmised, of Barry's comic-strip background—but they nonetheless lauded her as an acute observer of human nature. Edith Oliver of the New Yorker called Edna Arkins "the most enchanting heroine of the Off-Broadway season."

The Good Times Are Killing Me ends as Edna and Bonna enter junior high school, and Barry prepared to follow them, writing about their further adventures in short stories for Mother Jones, beginning in 1989. She also moved her weekly comic strip into the world of adolescence, changing its focus from four elementary schoolers to Marlys and her fourteen-year-old sister Maybonne. "I've pretty much exhausted what I know about [childhood]," she told the Chicago Sun-Times. Writing about adolescence was a new gamble. "It's hard because people hate that time of their lives. And in general, I think society does not like adolescence. It's really hard to find the right voice of the narrator."

As part of her search, Barry explored yet another aspect of popular culture: the diaries of teenage girls. Spotlighted in cartoon collections beginning with Come over, Come Over, Maybonne's adventures include coping with her overburdened, inadequate parents, getting snubbed by girlfriends, and acting out the role of the small intestine for science class ("I swear to God I hate my life"). She confides in her diary frequently, and Marlys, of course, reads it. Somehow Maybonne survives all the emotional ups and downs. "Life," she declares, "can magically turn cruddy then turn beautiful . . . and then back to cruddy again." The Freddie Stories and The Greatest of Marlys collect more adventures of Maybonne, Marlys, and Freddie. In the former, Freddie suffers indignities that include sexual abuse, name-calling, and incarceration for a crime he did not commit, but he manages to weather it all. The Freddie Stories is "a foray into the perceptions of children growing up in a callous and destructive culture" and "Barry's newest testimony of genius," commented Inga Muscio in Lambda Book Report. A Mother Jones reviewer added that "Freddie's charm is the sense he makes of the bleak, adult-infested world." The Greatest of Marlys shows how "simple pleasures" allow the siblings to cope in a world of "callous teachers, ruthless classmates, and vicious dogs," related Gordon Flagg in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly critic noted that the book displays Barry's talent for "the very nearly poetic invocation of moments of pubescent joy and humiliation."

Horror rather than joy is at the center of Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel. The year is 1971, and the protagonist, Roberta Rohbeson, is a sixteen-year-old living a "cruddy" life with her mother, sister, and misfit friends. Five years earlier, Roberta was the only survivor of a mass murderer's attack on a group of people in a motel in the Nevada desert. Roberta had arrived at that motel with her father, who had gone on a cross-country crime spree after the breakup with her mother. Roberta narrates this harrowing story in flashback. A Publishers Weekly reviewer thought "Barry goes over the top with alarming details," and felt readers may have trouble following this "labyrinthine" story. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman, however, praised Barry's "galvanic prose" and "daredevil literary wizardry"; mixed in with the story's darker aspects, Seaman wrote, is a "stubborn affection for our seriously flawed species." Library Journal reviewer Reba Leiding commented that "Roberta's wacky, irrepressible outlook makes her story fresh, compelling, and sometimes hilarious." And Alanna Nash, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Cruddy "a work of terrible beauty," marked by Barry's "ability to capture the paralyzing bleakness of despair, and her uncanny ear for dialogue."

In One Hundred Demons, Barry presents a collection of twenty autobiographical comic strip stories from an ongoing Salon.com feature "Mothers Who Think," which appeared online semi-monthly between April 7, 2000 and January 15, 2001. Barry, who calls the ink brush and watercolor drawings "autobifictionalgraphy," produced the strips by practicing an Asian painting exercise called "One Hundred Demons." In the drawings, Barry once again delves into the vagaries of adolescence ("Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend"), family, and love, as well as abused dogs, doing acid, and even the 2000 presidential election. Writing in the Library Journal, Steve Raiteri commented, "Barry's text-heavy panels fit a lot of story into a few pages, and her child-like drawings seem almost designed to encourage budding artist readers." Noting that this book "may be her breakthrough," Lev Grossman of Time added that "One Hundred Demons deserves a place on the shelf with serious graphic novels like Art Spiegelman's Maus." Writing in MELUS, Melinda L. de Jesus noted that the book "is an exploration of events and memories that deeply affected the artist, namely, her childhood and its manifold tragedies, large and small. It deftly exhibits the hallmarks of Barry's powerful storytelling aesthetic: her deliberately 'naíve' graphic style complements the brutally honest musings of its young narrator and the often harsh subjects of the strips themselves."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

The Good Times Are Killing Me (novel), Real Comet Press (Seattle, WA), 1988.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1987, p. 674; June 1, 1988, p. 1635; October 1, 1988, p. 185; April 15, 1994, p. 1496; August, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, p. 2020; August, 2000, Gordon Flagg, review of The Greatest of Marlys, p. 2093; August, 2002, Gordon Flagg, review of One Hundred Demons, p. 1907.

Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1987; April 19, 1989, section 5, p. 1.

Daily News (New York, NY), April 14, 1991.

Denver Post, February 12, 1989.

Interview, November, 1985, p. 119.

Lambda Book Report, July-August, 1999, Inga Muscio, review of The Freddie Stories, p. 20.

Library Journal, March 1, 1999, Stephen Weiner, review of The Freddie Stories, p. 78; September 15, 1999, Reba Leiding, review of Cruddy, p. 110; November 1, 2002, Steve Raiteri, review of One Hundred Demons, p. 64.

Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1990, p. H13; April 28, 1991.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 21, 1990, p. 10.

MELUS, spring, 2004, Melinda L. de Jesus, "Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons," p. 219.

Mother Jones, December, 1984, p. 17; March, 1999, review of The Freddie Stories, p. 75.

Ms., October, 1983, p. 106; April, 1985, p. 23.

New Straits Times, July 9, 2001, review of Cruddy.

Newsweek, August 19, 1991, p. 54.

New York, April 29, 1991, p. 84.

New Yorker, May 6, 1991, Edith Oliver, "The Theatre: Back Then," p. 81.

New York Post, April 19, 1991.

New York Times, November 27, 1988; August 14, 1991, p. C11.

New York Times Book Review, November 20, 1988, Deborah Stead, review of The Good Times Are Killing Me, p. 53; September 5, 1999, Alanna Nash, "Bad Trip."

Oregonian (Portland, OR), April 21, 1991.

People, March 30, 1987, p. 109; September 27, 1999, Anne-Marie O'Neill, review of Cruddy, p. 53.

Philadelphia Inquirer, September 27, 1991.

Publishers Weekly, March 15, 1999, review of The Freddie Stories, p. 48; July 12, 1999, review of Cruddy, p. 72; August 28, 2000, review of The Greatest of Marlys, p. 57; September 9, 2002, review of One Hundred Demons, p. 45.

St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch, April 2, 1988.

San Jose Mercury News, May 22, 1988.

Sassy, November, 1991, p. 43.

School Library Journal, March, 2003, Jody Sharp, review of One Hundred Demons, p. 262.

Seattle Times, November 6, 1988; April 25, 1991.

Sun-Times (Chicago, IL), April 30, 1989.

Time, August 26, 1991, p. 63; September 2, 2002, Lev Grossman, review of One Hundred Demons, p. 72.

Voice Literary Supplement, July, 1985, p. 13; January, 1989, p. 5.

Washington Post, December 12, 1988.

Washington Post Book World, December 20, 1987, p. 12; October 30, 1988, p. 16.