Qualification
A Graphic Memoir in Twelve Steps
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-Step programs.
“Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean.” —12-Step aphorism
David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have.
With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, David Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront, while "working" an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey—of far more than 12 steps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down) recounts in squirmy, funny detail a chaotic childhood that leads to an ironic "addiction" to recovery programs in this ultra-candid memoir. His self-absorbed parents love God, Overeaters Anonymous, and AA, leaving little time for their three sons, all of whom stumble into adulthood seeking parental figures in the form of convenient metanarratives. David struggles with money, porn, and his loyal but frustrated girlfriend-then-wife Rebecca but it's not clear he's an addict to anything in particular. He revels in the "God burst" (drawn as a halo-like bubble around his head) he experiences every time he gets to share at a meeting, especially when chosen for "qualification," 12-step lingo for a featured confessional moment. He chases inner peace so hard that he nearly ruins his life, an experience to which any searcher with an ego will relate. With scrunchy faces and lumpy bodies, the characters he meets along the way the Debtors Anonymous treasurer who makes off with the group's cash, the guy who brings a blow-up doll to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting form a tragicomic backdrop. Eventually, David begins listening to his own doubts about "working the programs," and starts seeing a Jungian analyst who helps him in a subtler but more profound way. Heatley's hefty inventory proves both sobering and spirit-lifting.
