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Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke
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Imagine Wanting Only This (original 2017; edition 2017)

by Kristen Radtke (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
26116101,306 (3.39)20
"A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief. When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and, not long after his funeral, the sight of an abandoned mining town marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted towns in the American Midwest, Italian villas, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. At once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke's stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: why are we here, and what will we leave behind?"--… (more)
Member:davidabrams
Title:Imagine Wanting Only This
Authors:Kristen Radtke (Author)
Info:Pantheon (2017), 288 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:*****
Tags:graphic novel, memoir

Work Information

Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke (2017)

  1. 00
    Spinning by Tillie Walden (beyondthefourthwall)
    beyondthefourthwall: Wistful graphic memoirs of young women trying to find stability.
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» See also 20 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 16 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  annikaleigh89 | Jul 26, 2023 |
thought provoking ( )
  pollycallahan | Jul 1, 2023 |
Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
  fernandie | Sep 15, 2022 |
Loved this memoir in graphic novel form. It has so much to say about ruins, impermanence, grieving, restlessness.... ( )
  jpe9 | Aug 4, 2022 |
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 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. ( )
1 vote jphamilton | Aug 20, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 16 (next | show all)
Radtke makes you feel that there is no grounding, that everything can go flying off at any moment. It is powerful and bleak, but strangely thrilling.
 
The title of Kristen Radtke’s remarkable graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This almost reads as a riddle. On one hand, it seems to ask a somewhat disgruntled question: “Could you imagine wanting just this, and nothing more?” On the other, the phrasing suggests, temptingly: “What if this is all you needed?” What if life, ephemeral and fleeting, could be devoid of ambition, of any desire for more? Either reading offers both gratification and emptiness, beauty as well as boredom. It’s a paradox rooted in the simple yet unanswerable question of what it means to live a meaningful life, and it’s the question at the heart of Radtke’s exploration, one that she tackles with a breathtaking mix of prose and illustration.... There are few definitive discoveries in Imagine Wanting Only This, which is frustrating at times, and by its end, it’s unclear whether Radtke has found a solution to the riddle of the book’s title (although the stunning sequence of final frames, which I won’t spoil by trying to describe, does offer a dramatic form of resolution). Her story doesn’t feel resigned to a hard fatalism though, and joy comes in some of its smallest moments, suggesting that the brevity of human time on earth may almost be a liberating thing.
 
The most beautiful graphic novel you'll read all year, Kristen Radtke's memoir is an absolutely stunning look at what it is to recover from grief, and is so haunting you'll be thinking about it for days after reading it.
added by Lemeritus | editNewsweek, Chelsea Hassler (Apr 17, 2017)
 
...one of the most haunting graphic memoirs I've ever read ... [Radtke] has forsaken and been forsaken, she is audacious and vulnerable, she takes risks and she is wounded by what the world is and how it bends back upon itself. As we turn the pages on her journey, we are ravaged and ravished ... With time and its doings as her subject, rot and decay, she does not adhere to strict chronology. She renders mold and splotch and broken things as both terrifying and lovely ... her work is as wonderful and heartbreaking the second time through. I'm still scooped out, but I'm still deeply grateful for the towering power of Radtke's vision.
 
Insights and images combine in a meditation on loss, grief, and the illusions of permanence.... Radtke isn’t an artist who also writes a little or a writer who scrawls but a master of both prose narrative and visual art. Like memory, the narrative loosens the binds of chronology, playing hopscotch through the author’s girlhood, college, formative years as an artist, and apocalyptic fantasy of her current home in New York.... Powerfully illustrated and incisively written—a subtle dazzler of a debut.
added by Lemeritus | editKirkus Reviews (Jan 10, 2017)
 
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For Danno
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Uncle Dan wrestled for the local college in the small Wisconsin town where I grew up.
Quotations
It’s like someone pulled a fire alarm and no one ever came back.
The future felt like an infinite and hazy concept, a space we’d undoubtedly occupy and conquer together.
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 loved the cobblestones leading up to my apartment’s front porch, I loved that on any given night I could look through a bar’s window and know who’d be sitting at the counter inside. I loved that on any given street I knew at least one person who lived in a hardwood-floored house there. It was an easy place to feel you’d conquered. It was a whole new kind of ownership.
I kept evidence of Andrew around me for years. I called him at inappropriate times. My cat still felt like our cat, my dishes felt like our dishes, until they didn’t.
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"A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief. When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and, not long after his funeral, the sight of an abandoned mining town marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted towns in the American Midwest, Italian villas, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. At once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke's stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: why are we here, and what will we leave behind?"--

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