Cathy Guisewite

Cathy was a four panel daily comic strip, when newspaper comic strips were in their prime. Cathy Guisewite, its creator, did that job, alone in a room, for 34 years. Now, she has written Fifty Things That Are Not My Fault, a comic strip in prose. This time it is really and specifically autobiographical.

The book gives Guisewite the ability to broaden her stories, build up to her punchlines , and most of all, expose her humanity. Because Fifty Things is nothing if not a summary of all the show more internal conflicts humans are capable of. The central column of the book, and the source of all her angst, is the three generation spread between her, her 19 year old daughter, and her 90 year old parents. Out of that Guisewite reaps a bounty of hypocrisy, irrationality, gullibility and most of all, self-consciousness.

She is self-conscious about her looks, her clothing, her size, her shape, her relationships to all three generations, and how she has, despite all efforts to the contrary, proven to be normal. She fights with her daughter, slamming her for every little thing, knowing all the while it is precisely the wrong thing to be doing. She interferes with her parents, who, after 90 years, know who they are and how they want to live. That is, without middle–aged daughters telling them to clear out the house, rearrange their belongings, move into assisted living, use medic alarm necklaces and other bothers to make their three daughters feel less burdened and guilty.

There is every possible foible covered in depth and with humor, from the gym to the mall, from child rearing to separation anxiety, from junk accumulation to more separation anxiety. She knows what’s wrong in every case, and in every case she goes ahead anyway. The contradictions are endless, and if there is a point to it all, it is that they are also universal.

Her humor is as delightful as ever. Her stories are beautifully structured with sarcasm, self-contradiction and self-pity. If truth be known, she is actually at fault for most of the fifty things, but it’s okay, we all are.

I found a line in her story of her probably 2000th trip to the mall that shows how delightful the whole book really is. She says of shopping: “There’s something magical about taking something that isn’t a problem yet home to meet the rest of my life.”

David Wineberg show less

I loved the Cathy comic strip. There were so many things in this book that I really could relate to...and there were so many things that I have friends that do the very same things that Cathy did in the same situations. The entries were funny, they were sad sometimes, and they were all thought provoking. Those readers younger than 55 will see what they will almost mostly have to look forward to...those of us older will just smile and nod...since we've probably been there and done that.

Cathy Guisewite comes out of retirement and brings her Cathy Andrews comic strip character with her to reflect on life in lockdown for an affluent White woman during the COVID-19 pandemic. I haven't read a Cathy strip in years, but quickly fell back into the rhythm of Guisewite's gentle "Ack!" humor about hair, eating, and shopping. It ain't deep, but it's comfortable.

Continuity buffs may worry about the utter absence of husband Irving Hillman and the daughter they were expecting in the show more final strip of the original series in 2010. show less

*Diets that don’t work
*The temptation of chocolate
*Recognizing that yes, you really do need nine pairs of almost but not quite identical black pumps
*The agony of swimsuit-trying-on season
*The endless search for the perfect jeans
*The elusive promise of cosmetics
*The fruitless search for organization and perfection

These are all themes that frequently appeared in the 'Cathy' comic strip over its 34-year run, and strip creator Cathy Guisewite has, not surprisingly, revisited them all in her show more book of essays, Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault (including, apparently, coming up with only 48 entries).

Added to that are further sources of angst from Guisewite’s personal life – being an empty-nester worrying about the innocence and vulnerability of her only child leaving home for college at precisely the same time she worries about the frailty and vulnerability of her aging parents. Those topics turn more heartfelt than humorous as one progresses into the collection, and the reader who is looking for laughs at their own foibles may find, instead, a great deal of soul-searching about trying to hold on to the people we love even as they are slipping away from us. show less