In My Begging Chart, her seventh collection of autobiographical comics, Keiler Roberts (Rat Time) offers a view of domestic life that praises the mundane with a gentle poignancy and inimitable dry wit and humor. Unfolding in a series of vignettes, the book relates her life with her husband, Scott, and their daughter, Xia, as well as her art and her experience living with multiple sclerosis. She pays particular attention to her parenting foibles: when Scott chastises her for letting Xia eat ice cream in the car on the way to the dentist, she responds, "I told you I was having a transition year. This is my new life." This sort of droll sendup of the language of wellness is characteristic of the book's attitude toward the theme of self-improvement common in diaristic comics. Another: after describing to her therapist that she likes to visualize her thoughts as cicadas clinging to her, Roberts concludes, "It doesn't help at all, but I like visualizations."
Roberts's rough-hewn drawing style lends a sense of immediacy to her observations. She often gives the smallest moments the most room on the page, such as one in which she rests on the couch with her daughter reclining in her lap, reading. These scenes, along with those in which Roberts discusses the fatiguing effects of MS, are marked by stillness and quiet, and are among the most affecting in the collection. Candid and funny, My Begging Chart finds whimsy in the minutiae of everyday life. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash.