When reading MariNaomi’s Gen-X comics memoir, I Thought You Loved Me, I feel as though I am collecting pieces of their past alongside them.
In this conversation, MariNaomi discusses the collage aspects of their memoir, specifically the compilation of sequential photographs, diary entries, notes, and drawings that help them reevaluate a friendship. The book creates an intimate space to explore the elusiveness of memory, the ways we hold on, and the ways we let go.
Lee Lee: Which physical piece of your history did you initially collect for this memoir? How did you realize its significance?
MariNaomi: I started out just writing down memories of [long-lost best friend] Jodie, as many of them as I could conjure. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a lot, considering we’d been through so much together. My mind, for whatever reason, had erased many of the good and mundane memories of her, and just held onto the bad stuff. In my book, the reader accompanies me in real time as I search for traces of our friendship’s existence, and write them down as I find them.
So I guess my first pieces were our letters and notes to each other, our photographs, and the boxes full of journals I read through, one by one. Once I put it all together, it felt significant. As I collected them, it felt like a scavenger hunt.
Lee: I love that idea for collecting memories: scavenger hunt. Such a fun perspective on the behind-the-scenes work for writing!
I enjoyed the repeated use of silhouettes throughout the book, specifically the way they were filled in with flowers and graphing paper. Can you describe your initial vision for this memoir and how the collage form impacted that vision?
MariNaomi: This project felt more like putting together a puzzle than writing a book. I had no idea what the final would look like, but I hoped it would include compassion, release, peace, and perspective.
One of the first things I did, after gathering my memory materials, was to assign meanings to images I would be using in my collage. The roses inside me symbolized my faith and love for my friend. When the roses are on the outside of me, my love/faith is just out of reach. When they’re gone, so is my faith in Jodie. The green brambles, which I think are licorice plant, symbolize my friend, who was green and wild in many ways. (I didn’t look up the plant until after the book was done, because I didn’t want to taint its meaning.) The lilacs represent memory, as the scent of lilacs makes me nostalgic in mysterious ways. The font type is narration, the typewriter collage are journal notes I’ve transcribed, and the cursive handwriting is my internal dialogue as I studied the materials in front of me. I intuited visual metaphors with the creation of each page. It was like building a collage sculpture.
Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I realize the first physical piece that had an impact on the book was my life-size double-sided collage, Love + Death, which appears in the front and back of the book. The collage displays my (and my cat’s) silhouette filled with flowers, both lying in the grass and flying in the sky. I borrowed my own visual metaphor for the length of this book.
The collage, which took years to make, was unfortunately destroyed when it was moved around improperly at a gallery, before it had a chance to ever be displayed.
Lee: I’m saddened to hear about the fate of Love + Death. It feels meaningful that this collage can remain as a visual metaphor for this memoir.
There was a photograph of your diaries in the memoir, along with drawings and handwritten letters. Can you describe your gathering process — the real-time recollection of these various fragments from your friendship with Jodie?
MariNaomi: It was tedious! I read every single calendar and diary entry from age 14 to the present day, bookmarking every single mention of Jodie. I kept meticulous notes of every single thing I did for most of those years, so it was a lot! Then, I went back and reread each mention, noting it on a spreadsheet, and typing out the relevant-seeming diary entries on my old electric typewriter (that I bought new when I was 18 or so). I gathered letters and photos, arranging and rearranging them in order to try to make sense of them. I took photos of everything, then assembled them into collages, making and erasing notes, drawing comics of conversations I had more solid memories of. It was quite a process.
Lee: As a reader sifting through these memories with you for the first time, I appreciated your meticulous notes because the timeline and friendship graph kept me grounded. What effect does the audience have on the way you organize memories and images on the page?
MariNaomi: When I started this project, I wasn’t sure where it was going with it, so I wasn’t sure that there’d ever be an audience. That said, as I went through it, I was partially cognizant that somebody-not-me wouldn’t have all the context I’d have looking at these old memories, so I did the best I could to spell it out. That helped me as well, putting all the details on the page. It was like creating a to-do list, organizing my thoughts and my life like that, something that I could check back on later to see how those details fit into the big picture.
Lee: What kind of practices did you do when you needed a little space to breathe and recharge, before delving back into your past memories?
MariNaomi: I started making this book with Post-its on the wall, and then a cork board when the Post-its lost their stickiness, trying to figure out the timeline for my relationship with Jodie. At first this went on in my dining room, where I had my desk located. That turned out to be untenable, because I’d notice it when I was eating or whatnot, and I needed to be able to disconnect. Eventually I got my own working space, and that made all the difference. I started each day fresh, ready to conquer this book, not haunted and exhausted from thinking about it all the time, against my will.
Lee: I’m struck by the vulnerability displayed on each page, especially in chapters two and three when past betrayals disrupted your sense of reality. How did these new truths and realizations affect your creative process, and how did you decide which pieces of yourself to keep and which pieces to share in the memoir?
MariNaomi: That’s the hardest part of doing memoir, deciding what to keep and what to toss away! In fact, that may be the hardest part about writing in general. I don’t tend to edit things out if they’re painful or embarrassing. If it makes me feel uncomfortable, chances are that it needs to be there, that THAT’s the part that will resonate with someone. The stuff I try to eliminate are other people’s secrets (if they don’t relate directly to me), or irrelevant details. It is hard, though, figuring out what those are, since it all seems relevant to me when I’m remembering it.
And part of me panics a little. Like, if I don’t include it, will I forget it was there? And is it actually relevant? Does it change the story at all? There’s a lot of trial and error involved for me. I hope I did it right, but I can’t be certain.
Lee: The theme of letting go appears throughout the book, specifically in connection with previous workplaces, friendships, lost loved ones, and memories. What is something you have intentionally or unintentionally been holding onto recently?
MariNaomi: I recently moved back to the Bay Area after almost a decade in Los Angeles. The home I’m in now is about half the size of my last one, so I’ve been shedding material items left and right. Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more at peace with my friendships waxing and waning, and not taking it all so personally when people disappear. I think making this book helped me a lot with that, in fact. I figure if we’re meant to be friends, we’ll fall back into each other’s lives at some point. Or not!
But that’s not the question, is it? I am getting much better at letting things go. But I will probably always hold onto all the journals and photos and letters and other evidence of feelings. If not for nostalgia, then for material for future books!
Lee: Each of your book projects feels so different in style and approach. Please tell me about what you’re working on next?
MariNaomi: As I made this book, I was simultaneously working on another book, a graphic novel about messed-up family dynamics, time travel, and memory. Two books about memory! The graphic novel is in a different style than this memoir, although I do incorporate some collage. My agent is currently pitching it.
The project I’m working on now is writing a middle-grade graphic novel about J-Pop superstars befriending a hafu tween in a small college town. Trung Le Nguyen will make the art for it, and it’ll be published by Little, Brown in 2026.
I’m also pursuing doing more public art pieces. I created art for some murals in Los Angeles last year, and I loved the experience. Public art feels so immediate in ways that book publishing just cannot be.
MariNaomi (they/them) is the award-winning author and illustrator of Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011;, Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014); Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016); I Thought YOU Hated ME (Retrofit Comics, 2016); the Life on Earth trilogy (Graphic Universe, 2018-2020); Dirty Produce (Workman Publishing, 2021); and the new collage-comics memoir I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in over eighty print publications and has been featured on websites such as The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, and BuzzFeed. Their comics have been translated into French and Russian.
Mari’s comics and paintings have been featured in the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American Museum. In 2011 and 2018, Mari toured with the literary roadshow Sister Spit. They are the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color Database, the Queer Cartoonists Database, and the Disabled Cartoonists Database. They have taught classes for the California College of the Arts Comics MFA program, and was a guest editor for PEN Illustrated. They were co-host of the Ask Bi Grlz podcast with author Myriam Gurba. Mari lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with their partner and a menagerie of beloved rescue animals
Lee Lee is a fiction candidate in Fresno State’s MFA program in creative writing. She is
a homebody who enjoys reading, crafting, and hoarding stationary.
Author photo: Geoff Cordner