Paperback: 348pp

Published: Lightning Books (January 2020)

ISBN: 9781785631672

Let Me Be Frank

Sarah Laing

£19.99

Comics 2010–2019

‘Audaciously, addictively honest’ – Anna Smaill

Let Me Be Frank brings Sarah Laing’s popular autobiographical comic series together for the first time.

Sarah Laing began blogging her comics in 2009 as a way to shed light on her fiction writing and to record life before it evaporated. The comics soon had a large audience, eager for the next instalment about Sarah’s parenting fails and successes, her writing, her obsession with Katherine Mansfield, her family’s history, her pet mice, sex, clothes and more.

Let Me Be Frank is a witty, whip-smart comic collection that is always disarmingly frank.

Extracts

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Extracts

quotes

‘Full of incidental and profound pleasure. Audaciously, addictively honest’

Anna Smaill, author of The Chimes

reviews

‘I first encountered the character of Sarah Laing in her autobiographical online comic Let Me Be Frank and was instantly intoxicated by her mix of neuroticism, loopy handwritten text and probably-unintentional romanticism of mundane domestic reality’

Greg Bruce, New Zealand Herald

‘Warm, searing...beautifully done. It’s amazing’

Antonia Honeywell, Booktime Brunch

‘A relatable and fun book that would suit fans of Alison Bechdel and Roz Chast but should also draw in readers new to the graphic novel format’

Bookish Beck

extras

Sarah Laing writes in The Spin-Off about the often painful genesis of Let Me Be Frank.

ABOUT

Sarah Laing

Sarah Laing is a fiction writer and graphic artist from New Zealand.

She comes at books from all angles, writing as well as designing and illustrating them. The author of a graphic memoir, two novels and a collection of short stories, she has also illustrated children’s books and designed and co-edited an anthology of New Zealand women’s comics.

In 2013 Sarah was the University of Auckland/Michael King Writers Centre fellow, and there she worked on her graphic memoir, Mansfield and Me. Grappling with Katherine Mansfield’s legacy as New Zealand’s finest short-story writer, she examined her own desire to be a ‘real writer’ in lush watercolour illustrations.

She lives in Wellington and is a mother of three.

Read more about Sarah and her work at sarahelaing.com.