An illustrator grows
Forsyth Harmon branches into writing with a bittersweet coming-of-age tale
While pregnant with her only child, Forsyth Harmon’s mother heard a voice that declared her baby would grow up to become an author and an illustrator. And she did.
“The voice I heard as I was growing up was my mother’s, and I very much wanted to make her premonition come true,” says Harmon, who has been an illustrator for Melissa Febos’ “Girlhood” and with Catherine Lacey on “The Art of the Affair.”
Now Harmon has added writing to the mix with “Justine,” her slender novel about an adolescent girl struggling to break free of loneliness and isolation on Long Island in the late 1990s. Harmon uses delicate line drawings to accompany and enhance the text of the novel, published this month by Tin House.
She cites as influences Daniel Clowes’ coming-of-age graphic novel “Ghost World” but also the fiction of Japanese women like Yoko Ogawa and Yuko Shimizu, “which have a bit more of a focus on the small details of daily life and a restraint that you might see in my writing,” although it lies alongside the influence of the 1990s indie films of Long Island by Hal Hartley and Larry Clark’s “Kids.”
“I think of this novel as a book about the kids who watched ‘Kids,’ ” she says.
Growing up, Harmon, 41, “spent a lot of time entertaining myself with pens and markers.” She studied visual art as an undergraduate and then, after working in advertising to chip away at her student debt, earned a master’s degree in fiction writing. She says “Justine” is the first of a trilogy about her protagonist, Ali.
“I just submitted to my agent a complete draft of the sequel,” she says.
Q
What made you decide to write this book now?
A
When I turned 30, I looked back at my adolescence and 20s and thought, “What happened?”
No one really writes novels just for fun. It’s not generally lucrative and it’s often gut-wrenchingly painful. But I find writing and drawing useful for introspection, and I felt a calling to look back at things I may not have been able to process as they happened in order to feel more confident
A and have more clarity moving forward It began as a short story. From into adulthood. The book was an investigation, there it took on length as well as processing and reclamation full-color watercolor illustrations like exercise. those you saw online. I then worked
I’ve heard this phrase: Face, trace and on a version as a traditional novel and erase. You face something and trace the slashed the images. But later I felt outlines of it so you can then move forward. strongly about including images. The Over the course of my three books, text had become more economical and I’ll look at: How much do we relive our restrained so I redrew the images in trauma if we’re not aware of it or if we get black and white in order to align with wrapped up in addiction? Even if we do the style of the text.
finally start to process it and feel our feelings, how much is change really possible? I’m not sure. I’m curious. And so I continue.
Q
You told some of this story on the Weird-Sister website a few years ago using just watercolor illustrations. How did it evolve into its current form?
QHow much did you research all the cultural touchstones of both time and place that are so central to the book?
A
I did more research on the abandoned psychiatric center that the teens visit than I needed to — I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole with that. And the character of Ryan is very interested in tristate hip-hop so I had to do quite a bit of research to make his observations accurate. The girls look at the fashion models in Vogue and I had been a Vogue subscriber but I ordered old issues on eBay in order to accurately capture the images. But it was kind of creepy because when the magazines arrived it was almost as if I didn’t need them because the images had so seared themselves into my mind back then.
Q
How much of it is emotionally autobiographical?
A
Alexander Chee’s essay about how to write an autobiographical novel talked about figuring out the shape of your trauma and the shape of your life and then transposing it to create fiction. The emotions are the foundation of a house but you paint the walls a different color and bring some new furniture in so that it’s emotionally true even though the details look different. That’s very true of this book.
And I don’t identify only with Ali. It’s often said novels are fractured writers’ neuroses spread across several characters trying to find an integrated whole: Like Justine I struggled with eating disorders; like the grandmother I like to clean when I’m flustered.
Q
Those watercolors had a vibrancy that feels like a teenager’s life spilling
Q
all over the place, but more like the character The book captures the pervasive Justine than Ali. Were these drawings angst of adolescence — Ali is confused meant to reflect Ali or be her drawings? or frustrated by her feelings for Justine and for Ryan — and it’s often funny but perhaps more frequently sad. Were you seeking that tone?
A
Ali is restrained and struggles to communicate, so I started to think of
A
the images as an extension of her interior, Ali doesn’t know: Does she want to as opposed to her actual illustrations. She be with Justine or does she want to sees the world in black and white, at close be her? Suffolk County overwhelmingly range. The book is about haunting to an voted for [Donald] Trump in the last extent and Ali’s difficulty in connection, two elections so in 1999, she’s not exactly so I wanted the images to support both of growing up in a place that is friendly to those intentions. I’d tie the text to an image the expression of queer desire. She doesn’t so as she starts to warm to Justine allow herself to reflect on those feelings. I you’ll see a butterfly spread its wings over do think about how the girls’ lives might several pages, and when she has a confusing have been different today, even out there intimate encounter, you’ll see a cassette — the popular media landscape is so tape unravel. much friendlier to queer identity now.