French Girl
Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in seventeen connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic—a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake—as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is a writer, poet, and visual artist Her memoir Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2020, during the pandemic lock down in Uruguay, she began drawing for the first time in her life, posting one drawing a day on social media where they developed a large following. Her graphic narratives now appear regularly in literary magazines and her graphic memoir, French Girl, will be published in September by Fieldmouse Press.