One! Hundred! Demons!

Memoir is defined as a narrative composed of personal experience. Barry plays with the conventions of literary memoir by introducing hybridity to her autobiographical graphic novel. She blends reality and fiction in both the illustrations and the storytelling, and combines major life turns with small revelatory moments to more truthfully show the reader how her mind works with all its imagination, fantasy, and repression.

In Chapter 1, Barry invites the reader to directly consider what makes a book memoir versus fiction. The main distinction is factual: True events make a memoir and false events make fiction. Barry then implies that she is going to be diving into the gray area between truth and fiction. She demonstrates this in “Intro” by drawing actual demons emerging from her page and handing some of the narration off to a multi-eyed demon. The reader understands that these demons are metaphorical, but Barry draws them in the same style as the rest of the book, allowing these symbolic and imaginative beings to inhabit the same artistic space as the drawings depicting real events from her life. Barry goes on to draw other imagined entities like the fantastical Aswang, a legendary half-demon, half-woman vampire, and more realistic fantasies, like an imagined kid losing their stuffed panda at the airport. Through these fantastical additions, we see why Barry asks if a memoir has to be entirely true; while these passages are imagined, they communicate a truth about Barry and the way her mind works.

Barry also mashes together formative life events, drawing intimate connections between major paradigm-shifting events and less earth-shattering moments. Rather than focus on a single event or chronology, Barry organizes the chapters thematically, jumping between experiences to across time to trace their impacts on her developing identity and to find unities between herself as a child and as an adult. Barry demonstrates this hybridized structure in the chapter “Resilience,” which examines a traumatic childhood sexual assault Barry only alludes to and a seemingly unrelated love triangle experience in school. In the chapter, the narrator Barry often begins to recount the assault, and then represses the memory, demanding of herself that she forget about it. In the void left by this missing memory, Barry explores another: In middle school, she spills another girl’s sexual secrets to a boy she is interested in and the boy abandons her for the more sexually experienced girl. The intimate shame of this episode hurts Barry, but it’s more acceptable than the trauma of the assault—possibly because here, Barry is also doing something harmful to someone else, so she feels more in control of the betrayal. Introducing the assault obliquely by alluding to learning about sex in a harsh way before she was ready allows readers to see how this previous experience affects how she interacts with the boy. Barry both discusses and demonstrates the fracturing of her psyche, merging the narrative of trauma and the meta-narrative of repression into one.