It’s tricky to be 19. Like many of us, I recall what it was like: adult, but not quite; feeling the world to be both inaccessible in some inchoate way and also full of possibility. You’re out of the house, old enough to live on your own, to experiment and explore desire (whatever that may mean to you) with neither permission nor scrutiny. At the same time, you still carry the uncertainties and wounds of childhood. You’re in a state of becoming, in every sense of the word.
The cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki specialize in this elusive territory; their 2014 YA graphic novel, This One Summer, follows two adolescent friends adrift in a small town as the long, hot days wax and wane. The book received an Eisner Award and a Caldecott Honor. It is deft and elegant, with a nuanced balance of text and image and an intuitive understanding of multidimensional storytelling. Over the years, it has been challenged by book banners—twice appearing on the American Library Association’s “Top Ten Most Challenged Books” list—for its use of profanity and representation of LGBTQ themes and other topics, including drugs.
Now the Tamakis, who collaborate long-distance (Mariko lives in California; Jillian, in Ontario), have produced their first work for an adult audience, Roaming, which in a lot of ways picks up where This One Summer leaves off. The characters in this book are older, in their first year of college, but the issues they face—questions of identity and sexuality and independence—are not dissimilar. Taking place over five days in Manhattan, where high school best friends Dani and Zoe have chosen to reconnect during a break from university, Roaming is a moving look at the peculiar, if inevitable, challenges of young adulthood, which these characters navigate with a certain double vision, one eye on the present and the other on the past.
The outcome is a graphic novel that is both universal and highly personal, in which even as we get to know Dani and Zoe—as well as Fiona, a college friend of Dani’s who has come along on the trip—we can’t help but glimpse ourselves.
This is demanding work, make no mistake. We may remember being 19, but re-creating the experience is a different matter; it’s often embarrassing (or, worse, traumatic) to look back. How to do justice to the complexities and barriers, the feelings we could not articulate? How to do justice to who we used to be?
Roaming offers a primer on precisely that, bestowing agency on its characters without sentimentality or gloss. In part, that’s because it is a novel; whatever autobiographical threads it contains are embedded in the larger arc. Taking place in 2009, the story is embedded in history as well. That year was the beginning of the Obama era. The iPhone had only recently come to market, and social media was in its early days. This makes for a setting that is recognizable but distant, which adds a layer of perspective to the immediacy of the narrative. The plot of Roaming may involve the dynamic among its protagonists, as they share a room in a Manhattan hostel and Zoe and Fiona pursue a flirtation with discomforting results. Yet for the Tamakis, this also becomes a lens. Not of retrospection but of presence: that of the three characters, not fixed but fluid, in the instant of figuring it out.
The past rendered as nascent, in other words.
The action begins with Zoe waiting for Dani at the Newark airport, where she overhears a woman on her cell phone. “I’m going to tell you something,” this person says, “but you have to keep this to yourself.” The line recalls the opening of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said.” In both instances, the authors are signaling that what we are about to read (or, better, hear) is private, even as it will be shared.
For Zoe, this has to do with her sexuality, which she’s just starting to inhabit; her college roommate has given her a buzz cut, and she is infatuated with Fiona as soon as they meet. For Dani, it means trying to recapture something that, she’s coming to understand, is already gone or shifting, which is to say: the relationship she and Zoe have had. For Fiona, it’s more complex. She is both outsider and agent of chaos, an art student with a deep investment in cool. As the three move through the city, these interior dramas are externalized. At the American Museum of Natural History, for instance, Dani is struck by the dioramas, but Fiona remains unimpressed. Instead, alone with Zoe, she says, “I dare you to kiss me,” and when Zoe does, the book spins into an extended reverie of images that concludes only when they reconnect with Dani beneath the life-size blue whale model in the Hall of Ocean Life.
Such wordless passages are a staple of Roaming, as they were of This One Summer; comics are a visual medium, after all. Here, however, the art performs another function: to integrate into the narrative all the things the characters cannot say. What more vivid strategy to evoke the depth of their emotions than, literally, to show them? What more effective device? The effect is to catch us up in the swirl, the tangle of these hearts, exposing what they can’t reveal to one another, or even to themselves.
This emerges most powerfully when Dani, feeling betrayed by Zoe and Fiona, escapes the hostel for Central Park. Zoe becomes frantic, calling and texting. When Dani finally responds, Zoe goes to meet her, while Fiona heads to Brooklyn on her own. “It’s just like…how dumb do you think I am?” Dani laments. “This whole time you’re, like, totally flirting with Fiona and acting like I don’t exist.… I wish Fiona never came.”
There it is, the vulnerability at the heart of everything.
It’s no simple task to express that level of love and longing. And yet, it works because there are no villains here. Even Fiona—confused, hiding behind a million masks—is portrayed with sympathy. Yes, she causes trouble but only because she is troubled. Like Dani and Zoe, she is lonely. The three of them are struggling to reconcile who they are becoming with who they used to be. Such an idea becomes explicit late in the book, when Zoe and Dani smoke a joint on the hostel fire escape. As the weed kicks in, the image palette retrenches, until suddenly Zoe has long hair and they are back in high school once more.
That’s a move you can get away with only in a graphic novel. But what the Tamakis are saying—or, more accurately, showing—is that we continue to contain our former selves even as we grow out of them. All the eras, they overlap inside us. Maturity as a matter of integration, I want to say. It is this that renders Roaming most authentic, open-ended even, because nothing is resolved.•
Drawn & Quarterly ROAMING, BY JILLIAN TAMAKI AND MARIKO TAMAKI
