Imagine Wanting Only This

Beautiful graphic memoir about confronting loss and unknowns in life and feeling that there must be more....but ultimately accepting that there might not be. Yearning -- for understanding, for meaning, for beauty, for redemption -- is almost palpable throughout. There is one great image of Kristen wide-eyed, but exhausted, completely surrounded on the page by the kinds of questions that keep a person up all night. Kristen faces the unexpected death of a beloved uncle, (Dan) due to a hereditary heart disease -- does she have it too? How do you live with a shadow over your life? What is the counterbalance to loss? "A book of sorrow filtered through intellect" is one cover blurb, which captures Radtke's skill at conveying abstract concepts show more through her drawings. There are themes here too of ruin -- both finding it and causing it -- and ultimately transforming it into art. Not a happy read, but a worthwhile one. show less

Here I am, having finished another graphic non-novel, Imagine Wanting Only This, by Kristen Radtke, which was her first book. I recently read her latest book, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, as I find her work fascinating. This book is being labelled by some a memoir … would that be a graphic memoir? [Sorry, as a bookseller, I’ve always had a beef with the label of graphic novel for everything done in that form.] She tells about a boyfriend she almost married, the schools she went to, a trip to the Philippines with a girlfriend, but the book is mostly about how forgotten, decaying cities and ghost towns have simply completely captured her interest. As Eula Biss says of the book, “Cities, ambitions, romances, and show more bodies come to ruin before our eye, as Kristen Radtke invites us, in her beautifully understated way, to be disturbed, fascinated, and yes, even attracted to that ruin.”

At one point she is interviewing an older woman about an abandon mining town the woman once lived in, asking why they moved away. “Mine shutdown, we moved on to the next one.” It seemed that Radtke was expecting something more exotic and nuanced, but had to settle for something mundanely practical.

She often includes side stories and tangents to her story, and one got into a horrible fire in Wisconsin that happened just as the big fire in Chicago grabbed all the headlines—taking up all the oxygen in the room. This fire spread so quickly and devastatingly, that the military came in to study it for how they could cause the most destruction with their bombing raids. Their studies and experimenting paid off with the later horrendous bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. She also tells us about her heart problems—something that runs throughout her family—including the death of her very favorite relative, her Uncle Donnie. Reading this book, one can easily see how the feelings of loneliness that surface throughout it, led her to her second book, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness.

I am very taken by both her writing and artwork. There’s both a sensitivity and a boldness to both, as she relates a real sorrow to the reader. She has a true love of ruins, human, personal, as well as a tour of Detroit and the rust belt, and the ancient sites in other parts of the world.

My late wife Vicky and I were always drawn to old architecture, especially when looking for locations for our bookstores. Often when a passing train was shaking the old cracked walls of our converted rice mill/bookstore in Woodland, it didn’t seem like a wild stretch of imagination to think of it eventually becoming a ruin … a mixture of books and bricks, bricks and books. I think Kristen Radtke would appreciate that. show less

This extraordinary graphic novel by a young Brooklyn-based artist and writer has a dazzling soulfulness and range that is almost impossible to convey verbally. A coming-of-age memoir of piercing vividness and at times wrenching honesty, Imagine Wanting Only This is one of the most visually impressive books of this type in recent memory. I am not an aficionado of graphic novels and so lack the vocabulary to do justice to the book's aesthetic. The drawings seem to me to be somewhat reminiscent of both Chris Ware in its emotional devastation and of Adrien Tomine in its sort of tonal flatness and crispness of detail, except that Radtke's line seems even more spacious and expansive, almost wittily so. An instant classic of its genre.

While Ratke was in college, she suddenly lost her beloved uncle. She had a difficult time recovering from his loss and started to take refuge at different ruined and forgotten places, around the U.S. and a few abroad, searching for answers and some kind of closure. She visits old mining towns and other abandoned cities, that once beat with life and hope. This is a melancholic narrative, nicely illustrated in stark black and white. I am not sure it all works for me, but this is a talented artist and writer and one worth keeping a close eye on.

Welp. I’ll start with the positives. I find the title evocative. The author is from my hometown (always a bit fun). I learned a few things. The parts about her uncle were quite poignant.

Others have said it better than me. This graphic novel is written from a place of navel-gazing, pretension, and ignorance. I can forgive all these qualities if there is humor, self-awareness, or a sharp voice in a book, but I found this one lacking. The stolen (and later carelessly lost) memorial was a mistake twice over: taking it in the first place and writing about it as she did. Reading his mother’s review of this book and seeing the pain it has caused her leaves an awful taste in my mouth. I wish it hadn’t been included at all.

Every city we visited afterward began to feel like the stock backdrop for some stagnant future, our imaginary kids stomping up the stairs next to photos of us twenty years younger, holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I don’t relate to the melancholy dissatisfaction that seems to pervade this memoir, but it’s enjoyable to read and well-illustrated.

Haunting. Gave me a mini existential crisis, but I realized the opposite of the fear of temporary is the freedom of temporary.