Pretending Is Lying

by Dominique Goblet, Sophie Yanow (Translator)

Overview

Now in paperback, a “tender, affecting” (NYTBR) memoir unlike any other, and the first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet.

In a series of dazzling fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black-and-white—Dominique Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents.

The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma—a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370484
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	125 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Dominique Goblet was born in Brussels, Belgium, and studied illustration at St. Luke’s Institute. Involved from the start in the creation of the experimental-comics publisher Frémok, she published several books with them. At the same time she worked with the Parisian publishing house L’Association and published two books with them, including Pretending Is Lying. Artist, comics author, and professor of comics and illustration, she is also certified as an electrician, plumber, and welder.

Sophie Yanow is a cartoonist and translator. She is the author of the autobiographical comic books War of Streets and Houses and What Is a Glacier? and of the Eisner Award–winning graphic novel The Contradictions.

Editorial Reviews

It is a rare gift to come across a book as tender, affecting and complete as Pretending Is Lying…[Goblet] distinguishes herself from memoirists who insist that their past pains are really so awful…She does not treasure her wounds as the pulsating source of her identity…Goblet has a wonderful sense of humor…One closes the book knowing that our deepest relationships both make time move forward and stand still. On one of the earliest pages, Goblet draws her face smallish in the center, leaving evidence of erased lines. In both art and life, the past exists in the present like sediment, like a faint or erased line.

The New York Times Book Review - Sheila Heti

02/20/2017
This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography. In her English-language debut, Goblet, an acclaimed comics pioneer in her native Belgium, juxtaposes her relationships with her alcoholic blowhard father, her distant partner, her abusive mother, and her combative daughter in a kaleidoscope of relationships turned into tugs-of-war. (In a short afterword, Goblet’s partner, Guy Marc Hinant, gets to the heart of this supposedly autobiographical work, suggesting that his own appearance in Goblet’s book does not constitute an actual appearance by him, but by an “avatar” that inhabits Goblet’s fictionalized truth.) Goblet changes her art style throughout—sometimes employing almost amateurish line scrawls, other times rich, mysterious, hazy color washes, and just about any style in between—to create a vivid and puzzling representation of emotional memory and the ways the brain retells stories to yourself in order to help you bear them. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach is postmodern, with a scruffy, anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it's marked everywhere by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale – an autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and brutality – with images that look like photos." —Etelka Lehoczky, NPR Book Concierge, "2017's Great Reads"

“It is a rare gift to come across a book as tender, affecting and complete as Pretending is Lying.”  — Sheila Heti, The New York Times Book Review 

“This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography.” —Publishers Weekly

"Primarily pencil-sketched, Goblet’s art is unbridled and alternately busy and peaceful. She uses lettering to great effect, too, expressing mood, feeling, and, in her father’s case, drunkenness with the appearance of the text. Some pages feature only vague, dimly lit shapes, as if there are ghosts hovering on the periphery of Goblet’s relationships, her memoir’s primary subject. This is an imaginative, nonlinear rendering of an artist’s life so far.” —Booklist

"A touchstone work of comics autobiography, from one of the genre’s key innovators, is finally translated, complete with expressive lettering newly handcrafted by the artist.”  —Sean Rogers, Globe and Mail

"Pretending Is Lying is a perceptive and poignant contribution to the fields of both experimental comics and graphic autobiography, and well worth the read.” — Hans Rollman,  Pop Matters

"Combining paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil, Goblet's mixed-media pages feel wet, textured, bleeding…. [Pretending is Lying is] part of a rich tradition of international graphic memoirs from Art Spiegelman’s Maus to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future...We're invited to peer into the artist's mind.... It is a privilege to serve as [her] confidante, if only for a while…" — Chantal McStay,  BOMB

“Dominique Goblet spent twelve years putting parts of her life to rest—explicit snippets and fragments that condense her entire childhood and sketch a tender portrait of the adult she is today...Goblet hides nothing. And she forgives, weaving together, in gray and black and on yellowing paper, with strokes of her brush, a shocking kind of autobiography.” —L’Express

 “Precise and poetic, perceptive and unflinching, Dominique Goblet’s comics cannot lie.” —Bill Kartalopoulos, series editor, The Best American Comics
 
“One of the most beautiful and successful books to be published by L’Association.” —du9
 
“Faire semblant c’est mentir raises interesting and upsetting questions about our relationships with our loved ones and the way in which we build those relationships.” —Actua BD

From the Publisher