Published in 2024 by Fieldmouse Press, 244 pages (ISBN 9781956636383). It can be purchased here.
“Poet and memoirist Kercheval (Space) makes a vibrant graphic debut in this gathering of loosely connected reveries on family history.... Kercheval writes with a musing, inquisitive voice but also embroiders her accounts with fairy tale flourishes. The description of the dozens of antique clocks displayed in her friend Jackie’s house gives way to a journey through a Narnia-like door to a distant forest; elsewhere, there are pricked fingers and glass coffins.... Kercheval’s arresting, mostly full-page pastel illustrations possess a dreamlike quality reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall (with nods to Cocteau). These evocative personal allegories unearth the knotted roots feeding a very particular family lore. Readers will be beguiled.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in 17 connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic—a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake—as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“The pages of French Girl could be framed and hung in a museum, but lucky for us they are bound in our hands, sequencing a creative vision. With this gorgeous marriage of minimalism and expressionism, Kercheval conjures dreams, fairy tales, and persistent aches; a witness to the surreal pain of lost worlds and the exuberant beauty of remembrance.”
—Amy Kurzweil
“With dreamlike drawings reminiscent of Chagall, Kercheval welcomes us into her meditation on family history, motherhood, grief, love, and displacement, rendered in colors so beautiful they’re almost edible.”
— Leela Corman
“Jesse Lee Kercheval has reached all the way down to the very bottom of a lake called Story and rescued the faces once forgotten there. And French Girl is the beautiful tale these faces have been waiting their whole lives to tell.”
— Sabrina Orah Mark
“French Girl is an arresting and beautiful memoir that evokes the infinite complications of daughterhood and motherhood in raw, gorgeous color. It pulses with heart, figuratively and literally.”
—Anthony Doerr
“French Girl delivers an enchanting and ethereal world paired with dreamy illustrations that evoke uncommon richness and depth of feeling. A true delight!”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
