The following interview is copyright (c) Paige La Grone, reproduced with permission. This interview first appeared in Mean Magazine #6, 1999. Paige can be found at Catamount Records.

An Interview with Lynda Barry by Paige La Grone
By Paige La Grone

Genius cartoonist-author Lynda Barry talks about Marlys and Maybonne, her new novel and her not-so-Cruddy Midwestern life. Once upon a time in a world not so far away, there lived a girl named Roberta. The daughter of a murderous Old Skull Popper guzzling butcher and a morbid chain smoking nurse, Roberta freaks out on acid and winds up in the emergency room. Thereafter, grounded for a year, she gives voice to her brief but unbelievable life in gravely detailed sentence fragments that gurgle, lurch and snake through a sequence of freakishly staggering events set five years apart, climaxing in a bloodbath in the Nevada desert. She handily sums it up by calling it Cruddy. From the pen of Lynda Barry, brilliant comic artist, author and playwright, comes this hell of a spooked-out tale. Cruddy is a modern-day fairy tale in all its blackly comedic gore: a story of loss, revenge and grotesque violence starring the poster families of dysfunction, a knife called Little Debbie and a girl formerly known to "the father" as the technically engendered Clyde. And if all of this seems hard to stomach from the magical creator of Ernie's Pook's Comeek and The Good Times Are Killing Me, rest assured that Barry is safely burrowed into a life she loves, but like the dogs she's wild about, where there's an itch, she's gotta scratch. In a conversation through faxes in the days just before fall, Barry makes clear that life is not fiction holding forth on her reverence for the Once Upon a Time and living the happily ever after.

La Grone: I found Cruddy to be a difficult read — I kept having to lay the book aside and breathe deeply in order to digest it. The sights are ugly, the people raw and desperate for some kind of connection, and the smells and tastes are palpably revolting. Was it emotionally difficult to draw yourself into such a dark world on a daily basis?

Barry: Actually it was harder to not write Cruddy than to write it. To me the darkness and violence are more like the useful sort found in the original unsanitized versions of Grimm's fairy tales and A Thousand and One Nights, both of which were important books for me as a child. If one reads those stories as a literal account, like, say a newspaper account of events, even Hansel and Gretel is unbearably horrifying. There are a lot of people who see a lot of [well, black] hilarity in it. Um, I'm one of those people. The humor is there if one can stand to see it. But the horror is there too. And I surprised myself as I wrote it, mostly because it seemed so natural to me to write that way. I was very careful to not plan the story at all and to not think about it unless I was actually writing so that the experience would be more like reading a book than writing one. It was all in the living imaginary world for me, which is a very different world than the one where my vacuum cleaner and washer and dryer are.

La Grone: The characters all seem terribly disjointed and lonely. I kept wondering where their hope was. The greatest tenderness in the book was evident in the flawed but real connections made between these kids. Where in the world [or in whom] do you find hope, tenderness, mercy, goodness?

Barry: The last part of your question sounds like something Gretel would ask while she is in the clutches of the cannibal witch! I think my answer would be in the fairy tale. In the hopelessness, cruelty, heartlessness and evil that are part of the very best of fairy tales and which have been unfortunately removed from most modern versions. Cruddy is a story that takes place in the living imagination. In the Once Upon a Time place that one instinctively understands if one's mind hasn't become too literal and if one has a need to hear [or tell!!!] such a story. You could say I was compelled to write Cruddy in the same way I am compelled to take a walk every day just to see what I can see, just to be in a living world and interact with it physically and consciously and unconsciously. It was a very rich experience and that was the driving force.

La Grone: What took you to the Chicago area rather than, say, New York City or San Francisco or Minneapolis?

Barry: Well, like Goldilocks, I was looking for the place that felt just right, and it certainly is the Midwest. Eventually my husband and I are planning to have a small farm in Wisconsin, but for now we are happy here in Evanston. I did live at an artists' colony in Lake Forest, Illinois for a year and I worked on Cruddy there. That was a wonderful experience. It was like being a kid in the best sense of the word where my life centered around playing [creative work] and there was dinner on the table at night. It was a good place to be for a year, although I ended up living with over 300 people by the end of it, and it's hard to share a bathroom with someone new every two or three weeks. The colony was on an old prairie remnant, and it was a fantastic place to take walks, I have a lot of affection for that time and place. It was like living in the happily-ever-after part of a fairy tale.

La Grone: As a native of Seattle with some presumably strong negative feelings about your home city, how has sense of place informed your sensibilities?

Barry: Well, actually, I'm a native of Wisconsin, about four hours' drive from where I'm sitting now. I did grow up in Seattle, but my first sense experiences were here and whenever I came back to the Midwest, I felt a certain unnameable excitement. like I had found a world that was lost to me. I don't think it's any coincidence that I'm living now where the light is like it was when I was very young. Or that I am prone to choose long driving trips between here and the West Coast as my favorite sort of vacation.

La Grone: Your first comic was published, I believe, unbeknownst to you in the paper at your college, Evergreen. Did that excite you or horrify you?

Barry: Well, that sounds like two stories mixed together. I was at Evergreen when a friend of mine who worked at the University of Washington Daily printed a comic strip I sent him in a letter. It cracked me up more than anything. And when Matt [Groening] became the editor of the Evergreen paper, I used to send in fake letters to the editor that were short short stories and he published those, not really knowing me, but I guess liking the content. We sort of got to know each other through my doing that. It was a fun paper when he was editing it.

La Grone: Do you find as you get older and have more experiences that you become more like the girls in your comics or the girl you were in your interpretation of and emotional response to events?

Barry: Well, as I get older, I certainly look more like characters! I didn't begin to really wear glasses until I was in my early 30s and the frames I tend to choose look an awful lot like Marlys' or Maybonne's frames. It's funny to me because when people see that, they think it's another indication of my work being autobiographical when, in fact, Marlys and Maybonne were fully imagined at least 13 years before I began to look like them. Their lives are quite different than my life was when I was their age, but I feel much more like them now, like I've adopted their world view. I guess this is what happens when one hangs around imaginary friends so much. It might even be why one manifests them in the first place. They are so much more together than I ever was.

La Grone: I know you collect instruments and play some. I'd venture that music is a pretty big part of your life. Anything you're listening to these days that gets your rocks off?

Barry: What's on my CD player this second is Alex Chilton's High Priest but really, I like everything that is alive and not sanitized. I can't really play any instrument. I mess around but I don't have a knack far playing music which really is a drag.

La Grone: Your paintings of music folks, prints of which are included in the back of The Good Times Are Killing Me, are really alive and wonderfully folky. They remind me of the posters I have which were made at Hatch Show Print in Nashville on old woodblock printers and of the paintings and cutouts of Reverend Howard Finster and other self-taught artists. Had you painted previous to that, and are you painting now? Who are some of your favorite artists?

Barry: I've always made pictures. When I was in jr. high I had a lot of satisfying nights spent copying the pictures off of different album cavers and the paintings in (the now out-of-print version of) The Good Times Are Killing Me are pretty much that. I like to work in series and that was one series I'd done. Lately I've been painting a lot of animals. Rabbits and elephants and fish. Oh, and monsters. I've always painted monsters. I care for monsters very much. I like Dubuffet. He makes good monsters. And Lautrec, also an excellent monster maker when monsters are called for [and they often are] and quite a guy when it comes to depicting a living world. I pretty much like everything that seems living and genuine to me.

La Grone: What was it like having The Good Times come to life on stage?

Barry: It was kind of like being able to fly and turn invisible at the same time. It was a wonderful surreal feeling. I had really good people to work with. The only problem with it was it took up all of my time and I couldn't really work on anything else, and that became disorienting. I spend most of my time alone, and I like it that way, I need to work on things by myself, it turns out. But it was fun and I wouldn't mind doing it every once in awhile.

La Grone: Has marriage changed your life artistically? Have you or do you plan to collaborate on projects?

Barry: My husband is a really goad painter and a really good sculptor, and the first floor of our big old funky house is his studio. I have the third floor. We mainly live an the second floor, but there isn't a room in the house without some sort of project going on in it. He works during the day restoring prairies and oak savannas. So at the end of the day there is always a lot to talk about. He drives a tractor around and wears bib overalls and then comes home and we eat dinner and then we both make things in out studios and run up and down the stairs and look at what the other is doing. We work on the house together - we tiled the bathrooms and put up a ceiling in my studio and painted all the walls and do all the things hardcore do-it-yourself types do. We both love to build things and fix things, and we like to hang out together. He makes me laugh really really hard. I have a Casio keyboard I got at a garage sale, and I've taught the dogs how to "play" it. They can select rhythms and chords and then they do nose solos. We roll around on the couch laughing a lot at the dog music. It's a happy active household with occasional explosive scream fights that are also kind of fun. I lucked out with my home life.

La Grone: In the last number of years, you seem to have largely retreated from a public life. Would you talk about why that is?

Barry: It's a lot more fun to have a regular old private life. At least for me it is. It feels open. I like to go places and not have anyone know anything about me. I like the freedom of it. That's a treasure I don't want to mess with. I go everywhere as freely as any plain-looking middle-aged woman might, and no one bugs me. That is a beautiful thing.

La Grone: What gives you a sense of purpose?

Barry: Hanging clothes out on the clothes line. I am not kidding. Everyone has something they do that makes them feel solid and secure. The thing I do is laundry. I'm always sad in the winter when I have to use the dryer. I like to hang the clothes and then sit and stare at them. It must be connected with a very old happy memory because it always works. I always feel grounded when I do that.

La Grone: Do you feel a sense of community in your everyday life?

Barry: Well, I am very interested in being a good neighbor in the oldest sense of the word, And I am good friends with my neighbors, and I do things like take care of their pets and bake pies that I bring over, and I have coffee on their front porches, and I shovel the snow on the front walks sometimes. We have a cool group of people on my street, all different ages, and until recently, no one really knew what it was I did. They knew I wrote and made comic strips, but it doesn't really come up that often, and I like that. I also have good friendships with several kids who come and stay with me for different weeks out of the summer. There are three brothers who have been spending a week with me every summer for the last seven years. My friendships with kids and adolescents mean a lot to me. I love my town and I like reading the local paper and getting in a lather about a building being torn down or put up. I go around with other neighbors and get signatures to get speed humps put in the alley and we always decorate our house for different holidays and do spooky front-porch displays and shows on Halloween. You know, the average Midwestern life as much as I can make it so. I have keys to all my neighbors' houses and they have keys to mine. In fact, in a minute here I have to go next door and let the dogs out. Between my house and the next we have six dogs, and I like having them all out at the same time. I like lots of dogs as often as possible.

La Grone: What are you working on currently? Any future projects?

Barry: Right now I'm working on things related to the publication of Cruddy and getting my office and studio organized so it will be in good shape when the book tour and interviews are over. Then we shall see! I never know what I'm going to do until I'm actually doing it.