A Book of Essays From Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite — Did She Write It or Did I? Sheltering at Home Week 26

September 11, 2020 Sheltering at Home Week 26

Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite has written a book. Not a collection of her cartoons this time around. But a real book of essays with actual words, paragraphs and chapter titles.

I could have written that book.

No, I am not — not! — saying that I have the writing chops to have put this book together and snagged a publisher for it.

What I am saying is, the thoughts that Cathy Guisewite has put down on paper (pixels?) here are identical to the thoughts that have been running around in my own brain for a while now.

Skimpy Bathing Suits

Words like, “Not many boys wanted a second date with a feminist.”

And, “Why is it . . . that the more power women have gained, the skimpier swimwear has gotten?”

And, it’s “not my fault that my wants and needs are more deeply understood by Amazon Prime than by 99 percent of the men I ever dated!”

And, “I used to eat a muffin and have calorie guilt. Now I have calorie guilt, carbohydrate guilt, fat guilt, sugar guilt, gluten guilt, non-organic blueberry guilt, manufacturing process pollution guilt, non-biodegradable wrapper guilt, carbon footprint guilt. Nine entire guilt categories per muffin.”

Guisewite’s book is Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault: Essays From the Grown-Up Years, published by Putnam in 2019 and out now in paperback.

The “Cathy” Comic Strip

I don’t know Cathy, but I feel like I know her. Maybe you do too if you’ve followed her comic strip, “Cathy,” which ran in nearly 1,400 newspapers over 34 years.

For this latest book, Guisewite has switched gears and moved on to writing personal essays in the tradition of Erma Bombeck, Nora Ephron, Anna Quindlen and Anne Lamott.

Guisewite’s mother — a force of nature in the “Cathy” cartoons — shows up in this book. As does Guisewite’s beloved father and very teenaged daughter. Also, Guisewite’s own aging, feminist-still-in-the-making self.

Professional, Sisterly Envy

Guisewite’s book has been keeping me company during the isolating months of the coronavirus shut-down. As I pore over it, a mix of feelings surfaces — one part amusement, one part sisterly solidarity — and about a hundred parts professional envy.

Dang! Guisewite has beaten me to it. She’s written the goldarn book I’ve been cooking up and stewing over on this website for a decade now.

Who’s going to pay good money for a book from me when they can buy Guisewite’s and be served up the same thoughts on mothers, daughters, careers and shoes that I’ve been entertaining for years?

(To make matters worse, Guisewite can draw! She has punctuated her funny, pithy thoughts with adorable, “Cathy”-style squiggles and sketches. Sigh.)

A Kindred Spirit?

What’s going on here? How did this happen? Is Cathy Guisewite some kind of kindred spirit? A soul sister?

Yes, indeed, Guisewite is a sister of sorts. First of all, we actually belonged to the same chapter of the same sorority at the University of Michigan. I never met her there — she joined up almost a decade after I did. But her “Cathy” cartoons appear regularly in our chapter newsletter.

Far more relevant than that sorority connection, however, is the mid-century, Midwestern, middle class — Michigan — connection that we share. Guisewite grew up in Midland, Michigan. I came of age in the suburbs of Detroit. She lives in Los Angeles now. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s the Michigan Talking

You can take the girl out of Michigan, but you can’t take the Michigan out of the girl. Those hearts and flowers you used to see all over the “Cathy” cartoon strip? That’s the Michigan talking.

Same goes for the anthem to her mother and to Guisewite’s Midwestern roots that appears toward the end of the book: “I am my mother’s daughter,” she writes. “I have optimism wrapped around my DNA like a strand of Christmas lights.”

But What Makes Her So Funny?

Optimism. That’s at the core of what the two of us share. It’s a kind of faith, baked into our every thought, a trust that somehow things will right themselves. It’s a stubborn trust in the good intentions of people close by — and of people we’ve never met.

It’s that trust, I think, that makes it possible to laugh at oneself, as Guisewite so skillfully does. It’s also the thing that makes others want to laugh along with you.

If you miss the old “Cathy” cartoons and would like to reconnect with Guisewite’s work, check out the spot-on cartoons she’s putting on Instagram these days — “Scenes from Isolation.”

More Michigan stories at “Geographic Mobility in America — Watching My Grown-Up Kids Disappear.”  Also, “Am I Scotch?* Or Midwestern?” (Scotch?* Or Scottish? For more on that question, follow the link to the post.)