‘Zine by Pagan Kennedy

The eight chapters of this book correspond to the eight issues of a zine that Pagan Kennedy put out between the ages of 25 and 31 (she wrote this book when she was 32), and each chapter consists mostly of b&w reproductions of an issue of the zine itself, preceded by an introductory essay. As it turns out, I liked Kennedy’s persona for the essays (which is more self-reflective) more than her persona for the zine (which was intentionally self-parodic). My interest in the zines was also not helped by the fact that Kennedy’s cultural touchstones are (mostly) quite different from mine: at one point in one of the intro essays she talks about reading a lot as a kid, and loving books that I loved, too: “the Narnia series, Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time” (26). But those books don’t come up in the zine: the childhood thing that comes up the most is her love of the Partridge Family. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of that show, so references to the characters and the actors who played them were lost on me.)

I did enjoy reading about Kennedy’s experiences as a writer—how she loved being in a graduate writing program with writers who were as neurotic/obsessive as she was, her perception that “The New Yorker seemed to publish story after story about people getting divorced in Westchester,” how her “fanzine was a fuck-you to The New Yorker and the University of Iowa and the Bread Loaf writers’ colony and Ticknor & Fields and Raymond Carver and agents named Bitsy and John Updike and the twenty-two-year-old novelists that Newsweek told me hung out in the hottest clubs and English Comp jobs” (7, 9). I also liked various autobiographical comics in the zine: there’s one about a favorite pair of green sneakers, and another about a best friend who moved away, and another about a health problem and the difficulties of navigating the medical system. And one issue is mostly about a road trip across the US, and includes some really pleasing writing, like this description of a Halloween on the road: “Then I drove us through the swamps of Louisiana, along a highway flanked by burned-out cars and the twisted outlines of trees. A heavy mist swirled on the road in front of us, scudding and eddying on the asphalt and disappearing in tendrils all around the car.” (95-96)