Briana Loewinsohn’s Raised by Ghosts begins with a note to the reader: This is not a love story. It is a love letter.
In the Oakland-based cartoonist’s latest book, a semi-autobiographical young adult graphic novel set in early 1990s Oakland, notes are a kind of currency for young Briana and her high school classmates, a way to connect with friends and disconnect from the sober realities of homelife.
Development on the book began in 2022, during the in-between period after finishing her critically acclaimed memoir Ephemera while waiting for its eventual release. That period lasted for about a year, a difficult time for someone who had self-published for most of their life. “You can really lose your mind during that time,” Loewinsohn said. “It’s a really bizarre process.”
And when she started Raised by Ghosts, Loewinsohn didn’t quite know exactly what she wanted the story to be, but she knew she wanted it to be about the act of writing notes. Naturally, this brought her back to her teenage and young adult years, growing up in Oakland in the ’80s and ’90s, during that time of passing notes between friends, before cell phones.
Tapping into that high school mindset was easy given that Loewisohn had a literal trash bag of notes she’d kept from high school. Upon revisiting the old notes from her friends, Loewinsohn realized how honest they were. At times cringey and dramatic, she admitted, the notes often presented different sides of a story, an unspoken perception of events that changed the way she thought of a particular memory. And so she used that as a storytelling device in the book, a throughline driving the plot forward, with notes from Briana bookmarking the end of brief vignettes and creating a narrative ebb and flow.
“In the story, the intention is that [the notes] are like parallel stories of the same thing, like the same moment in your life, and how you would present it one way but how it might feel in a different way, and then each would explain each other a little better,” Loewinsohn said. “[The notes] are more honest than I ever would have been in a note to a friend, and ideally better written than what I would have written in a journal.”
Much of what Loewinsohn attempted to do was to tap into “what it felt like to be a teenager in the ’90s, so, along with the notes, music and mixtapes help bring that experience to life. Everything from Wu-Tang Clan to Madonna to Nirvana, it all plays a part in soundtracking this lonely sense of freedom throughout the pages. Loewinsohn’s memoir, Ephemera, also played with isolation, but where Ephemera is reserved, experimental and with hardly any dialogue throughout, Raised by Ghosts feels more grounded by the time period, and because of that feels alive and brimming with atmosphere.
“I think there are a lot of themes which have sort of always been in work,” Loewinsohn said. “Themes of isolations and of having a rich inner life, and trying to understand them and that disconnect between inside and outside.”
In Raised by Ghosts, Loewinsohn leans into one of her comic idols, Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes, whom she said “was a genius.” There’s even a panel in which Briana wears a Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt. While Raised by Ghosts does offer more in the way of dialogue than Ephemera, it’s still a quiet story, offering sincere moments of joy and sorrow one might experience as a teenager.
“[Raised by Ghosts is] just a big hug for teenagers. They have it hard,” Loewinsohn said. “Whether they’re dramatic and whether that’s warranted, those feelings are really big and they feel really real, and they are real. And that’s really the point of the book, to just stop for a second, absorb some love, and to look for the things that you have that can give you that.
“For me, family was all over the place and unpredictable,” she continued, “but I found in friendship, even though there would be ups and down, it was all much more solid for me.”
The book’s backmatter features an illustrated guide on how to fold notes. In an age of text messaging and emails and “the cloud,” Loewinsohn hopes more people embrace the tender, tactile experience of writing and receiving notes.
“Having concrete items, like a drawing or a note or something that you have in your hand, feels very important to me,” Loewinsohn said. “Drawing something or writing something gets it out of your head, that ambiguity, and makes it a tangible object that lasts.”
Sure, you don’t have to keep all your notes in a trash bag, but may we suggest the humble shoe box?
Briana Loewinsohn will appear for a book signing and talk at 5pm on Thursday, March 20, at Comix Experience, 305 Divisadero St., San Francisco. 415.863.9258. comixexperience.com/events
