Smoke

An excerpt of "French Girl," Jesse Lee Kercheval's forthcoming graphic memoir.

Jun 12, 2024

Preorder the book, out in August, through Field Mouse Press’s crowdfunding campaign.

Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is a writer, poet, and visual artist. Her memoir Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2020, during the pandemic lock down in Uruguay, she began drawing for the first time in her life, posting one drawing a day on social media where they developed a large following. Her graphic narratives now appear regularly in literary magazines and her graphic memoir, French Girl, will be published in August by Fieldmouse Press.

French Girl is a graphic memoir told in a series of stories that blend boldly expressionistic and dreamlike colors with spare and unflinching text. Exploring Jesse Lee's relationship with her mother, her childhood, her own motherhood, and the passage of time, French Girl is a reflection on the material and immaterial ways that our families affect us.

When I was eight, my mother taught me to answer the phone by saying, “Kercheval residence.” Then “Jesse Lee speaking. May I ask who is calling?” She had already taught my sister, two years older, the same archaic phone etiquette. Archaic because my mother was older than any other mother we knew. She’d been 40 when my sister, her first child at an age viewed in those days as two dangerous for a natural birth. And I had been her second, scheduled cesarian. And the phone regimen also drew on her years working as a civil servant in the Treasury Department and before that as a major in the Women’s Army Corp in WW II. More on business practice than, as they called it in those days, home economics. Until we moved to Florida when I was ten, my mother had never been a housewife, never been home all day.

None of my friends answered the phone like that when I called their houses. But that wasn’t what struck me as strange about my mother’s telephone instructions. It was that she had us answer, Kercheval residence. Or even more specifically she answered the phone, Kercheval residence. It was her last name, as it was mine, my sister’s, my father’s. She was Mrs. Kercheval. But she wasn’t, in some way I could not quite define at that age, a Kercheval. Not by blood. And not in other ways either.

When I started drawing my mother for “Smoke,” this came back to me. Not really a Kercheval. And with each page, it became clearer what the divisions in my family really were. - Jesse Lee Kercheval