Stone Fruit
introduced by Jillian Tamaki
INTRODUCED BY Jillian Tamaki author or coauthor of nine books, including Boundless, published in 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly.
Lee Lai is a cartoonist who centers bodies: how they are held, the space between them, the way they touch and are touched. Bodies communicate as much as words in her work, and they illuminate the underlying truths of the overlapping relationships in Stone Fruit. At the beginning of Lai’s debut graphic novel we see Bron and Ray’s relationship at its best: caring for Ray’s little niece, Nessie. In the forest, the couple running wild and anchored by the exuberant child, the world kind of falls away. But when their coupledom starts to fissure, both women are set adrift and left to confront fractured family ties alone. Bron returns to her childhood home and strict family, looking for
understanding, while Ray attempts to broker a detente with her resentful sister, Nessie’s single mom. Personal bonds—romantic, platonic, familial— are examined unflinchingly and tenderly in Stone Fruit. The complicated nature of care is threaded through much of Lai’s work, which has ranged from zines to webcomics to now a fulllength graphic novel.
I am curious as to your path to comics. Were you always focused on comics as a medium? Or did you start with an interest in drawing or writing first?
I have always drawn pictures, and as a kid I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator—something I still think about, but it’s always struck me as a level of challenging that I don’t think I’m equipped for yet. I spent a few years in my adolescence making stopmotion animations—that have mercifully all disappeared from the internet by now—and I think it schooled me in fostering patience for laborious processes, as well as an appreciation for trying to represent motion. I didn’t know I liked writing as much as I do until taking on this project. The first few years of making comics were spent figuring out aesthetic preferences and the technical bits. Even though I still think about these things a lot, when I started really grappling with how to build characters and dialogue, my interests swung more heavily in that direction.
The characters in Stone Fruit are deftly defined. You allude to their histories and relationships without spelling them out explicitly, which I think is quite difficult to accomplish. How much work, even if ultimately unused, goes into understanding characters during the writing process, i.e., backstory, plotting family histories, etc.?
It was a lot more work than I expected to build characters with convincing and relevant pasts. I went into the project treating the characters too much like chess pieces and moving them around in the story to play out certain roles. I think they became more complex when the original intentions of the story fell away and I started moving toward different and more ambiguous goals. It helped a lot to gossip about the characters with friends as if they were real people, and allow friends to share and project and speculate—“If I was Amanda, I’d be jealous of Ray and Bron getting to have so much fun with Nessie,” and so on. For the story I’m working on now, I’ve tried to flesh out the characters’ contexts much more from the start in small fictional bios, and it’s helping a lot in deciding how the story moves forward.
Do you like kids? Is Nessie based on anyone?
I like kids enormously—they’re funny and up-front and intuitive. But I think I’m as particular with kids as I am with grown people; I’ve met plenty of kids I don’t gel with. I’ve gone through different moments of wanting to be a parent, then really not, and I have settled into a general desire to be the gay auntie, much like Ray and Bron in the story. Writing this story with curiosity for Ray’s and Bron’s and Amanda’s different experiences of childcare was partly motivated by a desire to chew on these parenting feelings. Nessie, like all of the characters, was developed piecemeal as I worked through the script. She is based a bit on six-year-old me in the times when she’s beady-eyed or nervous, and then her screamier moments are drawn from playdates with my friend’s niece and times when I’ve worked with kids that age.
Your treatment of environments in Stone Fruit is quite notable. In some of the panels the backgrounds are fully painted, while some are quite spare line drawings. At other times the background falls away completely. Can you speak about these decisions and the role the environment plays in your storytelling?
In moments there are deliberate storytelling strategies behind what’s happening in the backgrounds—for strong emotional beats I like to focus on the character and their one mic-dropping bit of dialogue, and let the background go away. But I also just write comics as I like to read them, in the sense that I’m an easily distracted reader who gets regularly overwhelmed by visual busyness. I prefer to stick to a low panel-perpage count, and I want to have panels where the eye can breathe, so to speak.
You’ve published short-form work for years; Stone Fruit is your first graphic novel. What were some of the challenges you encountered working in a longer format? I noticed that you thanked a scriptwriting class in the acknowledgements. Did that play a role?
The scriptwriting class played a real big role in how this book turned out. I spent the first of the three years I worked on the book in a weekly class where we routinely submitted the same script for peer review, struggling toward the completion of a messy first draft. I’d never experienced sharing my work without supporting drawings to distract the reader from any bad writing, and it was horrifying and challenging in exactly the right way. I got a lot of crucial feedback along the lines of “all the characters sound the same,” “it’s kind of boring,” and “I can’t tell what’s happening,” which taught me a lot about how to make sure actions and dialogue are pulling their weight. I think I prefer long-form writing at this point because I’m a bit of a long-winded kind of person, and I like obsessing over the details of difficult relationships, which is hard for me to satisfyingly cover in short form.
In your book announcement on Instagram, you acknowledge all the people who kept you “sane and happy and fed
and encouraged” throughout the production process. Can you talk about that support? What did it look like?
It’s a good question. I think most makers have these people, and without them the work wouldn’t be the same. Aside from the people who gave their advice and guidance during the making of this thing, it just meant a lot to have some semblance of a social life during the process. Having a handful of relationships separate from the one I have with my own work has been pretty key to feeling okay with the world, when the world is actually pretty unhinged, and my feelings about what I’m making plummet routinely into dark, crabby, doubtful places. During the making of this book, often what I asked of my friends—other than “please have patience with me”—was “just tell me things that are going on in your life.” When I’m spending all of my hours working on something personal and private every day, my world shrinks to whatever my creative process looks like—which can be a very not-cozy space—and the world on the internet. And I think the pandemic so far has been a real lesson for me that the full emotional world cannot be accessed entirely on the internet. Occasional pep talks and meals are always helpful, but mainly just knowing that I’ve got sweet, neurotic, compassionate people living their own complicated lives proximally and entwined with mine was—and is—more supportive than I can say with any brevity.