Cartoonist Lynda Barry's dark and hilarious view of the world has a loopy connection to everyone's inner child-expecially to her own. The survivor of a difficult family and a failed first marriage, she has endured various starts, stops, and reversals, but today she has a boyfriend, a new novel due out this spring, and a fresh attitude-everything doesn't always suck.

Lynda Barry won't let me come to her house. Two years ago, the 41-year-old syndicated cartoonist and author decided that she wanted it to be a private island of tranquillity, which means that it is off-limits to the press. Instead, she comes to my house carrying a huge, overstuffed Guatemalan bag and a large cardboard box from a New Orleans bakery. Both are crammed with items that Barry thought I might like to see. Objects help her focus on her life, and for this visit she has pulled together a sort of traveling show-and-tell production.

There are original cartoon paintings she has done and photos of her preteen pen pals around the country; more photos of places she has visited and loved (like a house in Georgia with a yard full of outer-space totem poles) and of her boyfriend, Kevin Kawula, an artist who also restores prairies, dressed up as a woodchuck for a prairie festival.

And she has brought some darker, more unusual objects, too. "You know those kids' dolls like Fox Surprise, where it looks like a doll or an animal and then you unzip it and turn it inside out and something new emerges?" she asks. "I made one of my own. It's called Monster Surprise." It looks like a benign rag doll in a dress, but Barry shows me an opening and tells me to pull on the narrow strip of cloth sticking out. The cloth-actually many narrow, braided pieces of fabric knotted together-comes and comes until yards of the stuff, looking like the rag doll's intestines, fill my lap. "Keep pulling," she says in a gleeful voice. Finally, at the end of the rope, out pops what looks like a little cloth spider with a painted face. "It's her baby," she says. "Kids love it."

Then there are her collages. "I feel this urge to tear up pieces of paper and paste them together into pictures," she says. "I have ever since I was a kid." She buys old National Geographics from the library and cuts and pastes while watching television. "No one but Kevin has ever seen these collage books before," she says. It is easy to see why. These are not pretty pictures; rather, there are photos of people sitting around a dinner table with their eyes whited out while a skeleton waves from the back of the room. Sharks and other fish baring pointy teeth are pasted over people, replacing their heads, limbs, or sexual organs. Gentle-looking landscapes are threatened by free-floating skulls or snakes. There is one cutout of a 1950ish family out in the car for a Sunday drive. "That's how it looked to be with my family," she says. Then Barry turns the book to show another photo pasted upside down underneath the car: a group of bewildered, trapped monkeys huddled together. "And this is what it felt like."

No onehas to tell Lynda Barry to get in touch with her inner child. Her inner child is also her outer child. Themes of preteen angst-looks, friends, parents, and finding your way through a complex adult world-are on view in her comic strip "Ernie Pook." Syndicated in more than 100 alternative newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Reader and the Village Voice, "Ernie Pook" reaches more than a million readers a week. Barry's 1988 novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me, which was turned into a hit play Off Broadway, explored the thrilling joys and inner demons of childhood through her alter-ego character, Edna Arkins. And while her frequent commentaries on National Public Radio have occasionally touched on the minefields between men and women, more often than not Barry returns to the simple, awful, wonderful truths of what it feels like to be 9 or 11 or 13 years old.

"Lynda has the ability to remember late childhood and early adolescence in an astonishingly real way," says Margery Rockland, a Los Angeles-based journalist and long-time friend of Barry's. "She re-creates it not just in words but also in emotions. She can make you think, I didn't know anyone else felt like that."

"The voice she uses to express herself has a crazy, cosmic connection to the child in all of us," says David Isay, a freelance radio producer. "It's just right on, which makes Lynda's work very painful, very powerful stuff."

This is the territory Barry returns to in her long-awaited second novel, Cruddy, which took her ten years to write. "It serves me right because I wrote Good Times in ten days," she says. "I sat down and that just flew out. Boom! Done! And I thought, Great; I'll take ten days every year and write a novel."

Instead, she found the new project nearly impossible to complete. "I swear I've written thousands and thousands of pages"-something she will prove to me later-"but no matter how I approached this story, I reached a point where it wouldn't go any further. I would start to write and I would get frightened that nobody would want to read this heavy stuff."

To be published by Simon & Schuster Editions in May, Cruddy picks up the story of Edna Arkins, now 14, who lives "on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill on the cruddiest part of a crudded-out state, country, world, solar system, universe." It is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by Edna, who has more than her share of problems. Her mother is crazy, her father has vanished, and she is trying to fit into junior high, which she now realizes is totally impossible.

"It's kind of a cross between The Wizard of Oz and Easy Rider," says Barry. "It's about a bad adolescent situation and the question of what Edna should do: stay where she is? Or throw herself out into the world? And it's about how vulnerable you can become if you grow up with someone being horrible to you. It's very dark, al-though parts of it are also hilarious."

In other words, Cruddy provides a typical Barry view of the world.

She grew up in a tough, poor neighborhood in Seattle in an Irish-Filipino family with two brothers who, she says, were "younger and way taller." Her father was a butcher and her mother worked as a night janitor at a hospital. Money and affection were scarce. "My mother used to tell me things like, 'You're too ugly to be seen with, so you wait in the car while I go in the grocery.' And she told me not to make any direct eye contact with her, ever. I used to think that everyone had these restrictions with their parents." (Barry's parents could not be reached for comment for this story.)

She liked school, and that was her saving grace. She would get up early and be sitting on the steps of her grade school by the time the janitor arrived. One teacher-Barry had her for first and second grade-would let her into the classroom to do her own art projects before school started. Years later, Barry dedicated The Good Times Are Killing Me to that teacher and to the neighbor who took Barry to her evangelical black church.

When she was 13, her father moved out, leaving no forwarding address. To help the family she joined her mother on the night shift as a janitor. Days, she went to high school and began to dream of dropping out. "It was a rough, violent place and kids were getting beaten up all the time," she says. "Finally, in my junior year, I went to a counselor and said, 'You get me out of here or I'm quitting.'" Because Barry is one-quarter Filipino, he managed to get her shifted to a college-prep public high school as an Asian transfer student. "He wouldn't let the other school meet me beforehand. And when I showed up, it was a done deal. He really saved me."

For college, Barry picked Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. "It was an alternative school. Basically, you could get in if you wrote ME! in the middle of your index card. But I got a small student loan, some scholarship money, and work-study. And it turned out to be a fantastic place for me."

She made friends there for life with other students, including Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who was then editor of the college paper. And she was accepted into Evergreen's intensive painting program, where she was required to complete ten paintings a week. When a teacher looked at her work and said, "I think you could make your living doing this," Barry believed her. And then she was dumped by her boyfriend.

Unable to sleep or paint, Barry stayed up most nights drawing cartoons. At first, they were simplistic: men who were cactuses trying to get women to sleep with them. But drawing cartoons and putting images and words together soothed some of her inner demons. And the more she did it, the more she liked it. The college paper printed some of her cartoons and so did a publication at the University of Washington in Seattle, thanks to a friend who was the editor.

After graduating, Barry moved back to Seattle, where she drew and wrote for some alternative papers while working as a popcorn seller at a movie theatre. "One day, my boss said, 'You're on thin ice here' for no real reason. And I thought, Fuck this. I will never let anyone be my boss again."

Luckily, Robert Roth, then editor and publisher of the Chicago Reader, became interested in her work just as she quit. "Matt Groening wrote an article in the Los Angeles Reader that mentioned Lynda's work," says Roth. "So I asked her to send me some samples." He liked what he saw, although today he declines to analyze what that was beyond "a certain hipness." "But since then," he says, "I have seen years and years' worth of evidence that she really strikes a responsive chord in readers."

Roth made a deal: one cartoon a week for $80. "I was living in a rooming house where my rent was $99 a month," says Barry. "So I thought I had it made."

She did. Within two years, she was syndicated in alternative papers around the country. Freelance assignments from glossy magazines like Esquire and Mirabella came her way. And Harper-Collins started publishing collections of her cartoons, releasing an eventual nine books until Barry began publishing her own collections in 1995.

At the time, she thought that maybe she had finally put the bad times behind her.

Several weeks before she comes to my house, Barry makes a now-rare public appearance at an Evanston coffeehouse. The event is a promotion for Home and Family, two collections of memoirs written by novelists and journalists and edited by the Evanston-based lawyer-writer, husband-wife team of Steven and Sharon Sloan Fiffer.

Barry wrote an essay for Home, and she will be reading it today, although at first glance it is hard to tell how receptive this audience will be. They are upscale, sedate, and politically correct (the profits from the books sold this afternoon will be used to send poor kids to camp, which is the real draw for this crowd); Barry looks funky and is passing the time until her perform-ance by hooking a rag rug. They sport expensive chenille sweaters and Coach purses; Barry is wearing fifties eyeglasses, and wisps of dog hair (from Oo-la, her mixed-breed pooch) cling to her clothes.

When she is introduced, there are blank, polite nods around the room. She is getting very little name recognition. Then a woman at one table stage-whispers, "Oh, she's the one who didn't play by the rules."

Barry soon addresses this. "Getting an assignment (continued on page 111) [from the Fiffers] to write about a room in my house was wonderful," she tells the audience, "because it helped me find my voice as a writer. That might sound silly, for how can you be a writer if you don't have a voice? But it's like in junior high when they'd say, 'Just be yourself.' And I'd always think, But what if yourself sucks?"

The audience greets this revelation with stunned silence.

"Anyway, I didn't do well in reading completion in school," says Barry, "so when I got the letter from the Fiffers asking me to write for the book, I was so excited that-well, the truth is that I never finished reading the whole letter. I didn't know it was supposed to be a real room in a real house in my real life. I wrote about a teenage boy's room. So while I'm reading this, you will have to pretend that I'm a teenage boy." She pauses, taking the measure of the group. "Which isn't so hard since I did just say 'sucks.'"

Then Barry launches into an energetic reading. Her essay about the teenage boy's bedroom begins, "Keep out. Keep OUT. THIS MEANS YOU. Keep! Out! But Mom always comes in with the bogus excuse of 'Here are some clean socks and underwear, I'll just put them in your drawer.'" By the end, the audience has heard such eternal questions as "[Mom] said I could have a gerbil so I got a tarantula, tell me what is the basic difference?" and "So why give the dresser to me if she doesn't want me to wreck it?" When they applaud, there is a new yet wary respect for Barry, for she obviously understands their kids better than they do.

In 1986, Barry married a carpenter. She was 30 years old. The wedding was held in a trailer court outside of Seattle. "His father had left his mother just a few weeks before, so we were married in front of their trailer because his mother couldn't pull herself together to go more than a few feet outside her own door," says Barry. The gas meter on the side of the trailer served as the altar; a Unitarian minister, who pointed out that their shiny new rings would soon be nicked and dull, did the honors. For their honeymoon, they went to the Grand Canyon because her husband had never seen it. The trip was a romantic concept for Barry, who had fantasies that he would always remember seeing the Grand Canyon with his bride. When they got there, he looked at it and said, "I thought it would be bigger." That was the first time that Barry got a sinking "Oh, boy, what have I done?" feeling about her marriage.

Things didn't get any better. "Being married was a horrible, horrible thing," she says. "I felt like calling 911." The couple started marriage counseling almost immediately after their honeymoon. Yet in spite of the problems at home-or perhaps because of them-Barry's career began to move in a new, more focused direction. She had painted a series of portraits of seminal American musicians: Ma Rainey, Jimmie Rodgers, Otis Redding, and Little Willie John, among others. When the paintings were exhibited at a Seattle coffeehouse, a publishing company decided to produce a catalog, and Barry was asked to write an introduction. At first, she thought of doing a straightforward historical riff. Then she began to see the possibilities of telling a fictional story based on the paintings-a story that would relate to music and memories and her own childhood. She started her story with three questions: "Do you ever wonder what is music? Who invented it and what for and all that? And why hearing a certain song can make a whole entire time of your life suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?" Ten days later, she was finished with the manuscript for The Good Times Are Killing Me.

After a year and a half of counseling, Barry and her husband decided to get divorced. On their last night together, Barry was crying and packing when she turned to him and said, "At least we know we tried." And he said, "I wasn't really trying."

That made it easier to leave, although thanks to the divorce laws in Washington State, Barry traded her savings, her car, and the furniture in order to keep all the rights to Good Times. When she went to tell her mother goodbye, she found her at the kitchen table with pages of paperwork. "It was for a cemetery plot for me," says Barry. "She said all I needed to do was fill in the forms and then send in a monthly check." Barry said no and headed for New York.

Days, she would lie on her bed (her only piece of furniture except for a cardboard box that she used as a table) and hyperventilate. She started seeing a therapist. "But you know how when you're messed up you make bad decisions?" she says. Her therapist was obsessed with the Kennedy family. "She was always asking me things like, 'Are you more like John-John or Caroline?' She would ask me for a dream and when I started telling her one, she would interrupt, waving her hands and saying, 'Too many details.'"

Nights, she started dating again and was always dating trouble. It was as if she were giving men a pop quiz: Do you have a drug problem? Are you jobless? Are you totally withholding? If they passed, she would get involved. One day she saw a cartoon that said it all: Two women are sitting and talking. The first one says, "I hear your new boyfriend is Idi Amin." The second one says, "I can change him."

"It was like dating Dracula," Barry explains, "and saying, 'Honey, if you would just party in the sun with me one day.' You have no idea that this is not a possibility. And they're not going to tell you." One guy finally spelled it out. He took her to dinner and gave her a beautifully wrapped present, which turned out to be an expensive watch. "Then he told me that he was breaking up with me because I was shallow and boring and that I needed to change my whole personality," says Barry. "I mean, what ever happened to 'Honey, it's not you; it's me'?"

Time to move on. The publication of The Good Times Are Killing Me, in 1988, helped her do that. Although the book was identified as a novel on the cover, Barry thought that was a stretch. She preferred to call it a "novellini." It was a 70-page series of essays written in the strong, compelling first-person voice of Edna Arkins, a young girl struggling to make sense of life. It told the story of Edna and Bonna Willis, a poor white girl and a poor black girl whose friendship is challenged by the rules of junior high school and, in a larger sense, by society. It captured the silly, poignant feeling of music-induced childhood fantasies: "All I ever wanted to be in life was the star of [The Sound of Music]," says Edna. "Someone who sang like a record and ran and twirled around in the mountains; someone so perfect that even nuns could not understand her." The reviews of the book were positive. The New York Times called it "deft and deceptively simple," and many critics praised Barry's "impeccable ear." But some of the reviewers confessed to being confused about the reproductions of the paintings of musicians at the end of the novel.

In 1989, Barry collaborated with the City Lit Theatre Company in Chicago on a stage production of Good Times. With monologues straight from the book and music ranging from the Rice-a-Roni jingle to "Volare" to hits from Soul Train, the show found its audience at the Live Bait Theatre. It ran for 11 months. During that time, Barry decided that she loved Chicago. It seemed like a happy place to her and she moved here. In 1990, she dedicated her sixth collection of cartoons, Come Over, Come Over, to "Robert Roth and the city of Chicago."

The following year, a production of Good Times-using child actors-opened in New York at the nonprofit Second Stage and then moved to an Off Broadway theatre. The reviews were upbeat but more guarded than the ones in Chicago. Barry "captures the innocent abandon of childhood with the wit of a mature writer," Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, "but without letting go of the uninhibited child still lurking deep within herself." He also wrote that he found the second act, along with the title of the play, heavy going.

It didn't matter. Good Times opened doors for Barry, and she ran through them all until she was overwhelmed. She knew that she had to learn to say no, but she wasn't sure where to start or what she would do once she began turning down all the opportunities that came her way. Once, on Late Night with David Letter-man, she told stories about her Kennedy-obsessed shrink and got big laughs. "Then she died," says Barry. "That was one of the breakthroughs in my new era. When someone said she died, I didn't feel terrible." She pauses and time moves along to a silent beat. Then she shrugs. "OK, I confess. 'Ding-dong, the witch is dead' played in my head."

Years after her father left the family, Barry tracked him down in Wisconsin. "He told me he hadn't stayed in touch because he didn't want to pay child support," she says. She reestablished a relationship with him and flew her two brothers in to see him. At Christmas five years ago, Barry told him how hard it had been on her that he had just vanished. "And he said, 'Do you think it was easy for me? I've always felt bad about leaving your brothers.' And I felt like I was in East of Eden-you know, 'What about me, Dad?' After that visit I thought, I don't need this."

She hasn't spoken to either parent since then. "When I realized that I just dreaded talking to my mother, I stopped talking to her, too. They have tried to get in touch with me a few times, but my life started to get a lot better once I cut them out. My health has improved. My relationships have been better. I can think more clearly. Who can argue with that?"

Evidently, lots of people. "So many people who hear that you don't speak to your parents think it's a horrible thing." She puts on a scary, lecturing voice. "'They're going to die one day, you know.' And I think"-she looks at her watch-"So I've heard."

But when she stops joking, a certain resigned sadness settles over her. "I've learned that some people are just messed up," she says. "And those people can also have children, just like good people."

Over the Years, Barry's cartoons have become more verbal, less joke driven. In 1989, she gave up her full-page cartoon in Esquire for an illustrated short-story format in Mother Jones. When the opportunity for a year's fellowship at Ragdale, an artists' colony in Lake Forest, presented itself in 1993, Barry jumped at the chance.

She would use the time to work on a new novel. And it would be a way to step out of the whirlwind her life had become. "I was just constantly needing stimulation or I was in a terrible depression," she says. "And it was like the two sides of me didn't know about each other. If I felt terrible, I'd think it was because"-she adopts a maniacally driven voice-"I'm just not doing enough! And when I was doing too much, I'd think, I'll never feel bad again! Meanwhile, I couldn't take a walk in the woods. I couldn't sit down and read a book."

At Ragdale, meals are cooked for the residents, there is always food in the refrigerator, and a quiet, reflective atmos-phere reigns. "It was like having a home," she says. "After that, I wanted a different kind of life."

And it was at Ragdale that she met Kevin Kawula, who was working on the prairie behind the house. "One day, there was a little carved turtle outside my door with a note," she says. "It was from Kevin, but we kept missing each other so we didn't actually meet right away." When they did, Barry was nervous about his good looks and the difference in their ages. On their first date-a visit to a flea market-they were only a block away from Ragdale when Barry asked him how old he was. When she heard he was ten years younger, she told him to turn the truck around; she wasn't going to get involved. He didn't listen to her.

"Which is good, because I already really liked him," she says. "And we fell in love."

One day, while she was still living in Lake Forest, Barry headed back to Chicago. She ended up stopping in Evanston for coffee and the city charmed her. "I thought, This is such a nice neighborhood. I could live here." Now she and Kawula do. They bought an old house and fixed it up, working on the tile and many of the repairs together. The first floor is his studio, the attic floor is hers, and they live together-with Oo-la-on the second floor. Her car has become infamous around town; it's the Mazda hatchback with a big handwritten sign in the back window denouncing a local pet store for its cavalier attitude about the animals it sells.

Here are some of the things she has learned to do: not answer her phone; not return messages; not invite people-particularly reporters-to her house; not do lunch or the Letterman show; not feel pressured into doing anything. (In fact, after all the interviews for this story were completed, she refused to cooperate with the fact-checking process and also to be photographed or to provide illustrations.)

"I used to never be able to say no," Barry says. "Now I think to myself, Well, what is the worst thing that will happen if I say no? And the answer is, They'll think I'm a bitch." She stops and tries it on for size. "OK, I can live with that."

On her visit to my house, Barry has brought proof of how hard she has been wrestling lately with her inner demons: Tucked into the Guatemalan bag and the New Orleans bakery box are all the manifestations of Cruddy. First, she worked on it as a cartoon, a precisely drawn (as opposed to her usual funky cartoon style) pen-and-ink story, with six square blocks per page. Hundreds of squares later, she decided this wasn't what she wanted to say or how she wanted to say it. So she tried to write the story as the main character, Edna, would; it is, after all, a first-person novel.

Using a manual typewriter, she typed stream-of-consciousness riffs on cheap rag paper. Then she pasted the typing into composition books with black-and-white covers. During this phase, she found a bunch of real school notebooks in a dumpster and those sent her off in a new direction. "The notebooks reminded me how kids just write things down in an impressionistic manner, jumping all over the place," she says. So she started doing that in her manuscript, having Edna write biographies of the U.S. presidents and histories of the Pilgrims and Pocahontas. "I had a lot of fun, but that wasn't going anywhere." After filling up five composition books, she moved on.

Next, she typed her story on a computer and drew elegant little illustrations that she pasted on the printed pages. "Not dark enough," she says. In the final version, she used a paintbrush and watercolors, painting the words on pages ripped from yellow legal pads. "It's complicated because the pages had to dry before I could stack them together," she says. "So I had three drying while I was working on the fourth page. By the time I finished it, the first page was dry." The pages were then bundled together in four-inch stacks, with protective cardboard squares placed on the top and bottom, and tied together with a grosgrain ribbon. She smoothed out the prose when she copied the painted pages into the computer.

"People would ask me, 'Why is it taking you so long to write your next novel?' And I'd say, 'Oh, I haven't found the right pen.' But I guess it wasn't a joke. It wasn't until I started painting the words that the book finally came together for me."

But isn't that selling yourself short? I ask. Your creative process for this novel has involved more than just finding the right medium, hasn't it?

She thinks about it and as she does, she looks at the piles of objects she has brought along with her. Such a lot of stuff to carry around. "Yeah, I've changed," she says. "There is a sentence in Cruddy that came right out of my own diary as a 13-year-old: 'Is every day for the rest of my life going to suck like it does now?'" She laughs a full-bodied laugh that acknowledges the distance between then and now. "And I don't feel like that anymore."