Raised by Ghosts Review

One thing that I don't think most people realize -- certainly not in the moment -- is how insanely lonely and isolating high school is for everybody. I think people do understand at some point that your teenage years are tumultuous because of hormones and figuring out who you are and all that, but the part people don't further connect the dots with is that that leads to feelings of isolation. Your body is going through rapid changes but at a slightly different speed and timing compared to everyone around you, so you're all on different parts of the journey but none of you have the experience or even the vocabulary to express it adequately. So everyone goes through high school feeling like literally no one in the world understands what you're going through. We all try to deal with that in our own way, of course, and that's dependent on genetics and upbringing and social status and a ton of other variables. But when you get down to it, every teenager is lost and confused and feels like they're on an island by themself.

(How anybody looks back on that period of their life with fondness absolutely escapes me.)

But it's that lonliness that leads to all the experiments with self-expression. Writing bad poetry, making questionable fashion choices to either stand out or blend in, ascribing deeper context to superficial pop songs, trying to learn how to draw abstract concepts like emotions and feelings...

That brings us to Raised by Ghosts by Brian Loewinsohn. It's a semi-autobiographical account of her teenage years, starting slightly before high school and ending well before graduation. She spends her home life split between her divorced parents and, despite some social awkwardness, she makes a good group of friends that she's able to go out with on a regular basis. In fact, we pretty much only see Briana with her friends -- her parents are never depicted and a couple of her teachers only make a smattering of cameos.

The day-to-day events shown generally seem to be inconsequential. Riding the bus to school, hanging out during lunch, passing notes to one another in class... There is nothing that really stands out as a singular event -- no major accidents, or recitals, or family drama; the book doesn't even mention graduation at any point. It's just the day-to-day life of being a teenager in the back half of the 1990s. But in between these non-events, we get snippets of Briana's writings. Most look like diary entries, but sometimes it's just a note on the back of a paper lunch bag or a Post-It or something. They offer the reader a little more insight into Briana's emotional state that she might be trying to hide or ignore in the main narrative.

In many ways, Raised by Ghosts is the antithesis of books like Smile, Kiss Number 8, or Wash Day Diaries. While they all center around the teenage years and the development of self and self-awareness, Raised by Ghosts doesn't have a central theme or point. Loewinsohn looks at the entirety of teenage life, and how ordinary it really is for so many people. The beauty of life is often in the sublime, and that includes while you're growing up. While major events do often have an impact on our lives, those are infrequent. Equally, if not even more, impactful is what we deal with every day, regardless of how mundane.

At one point in the story, Briana and her friends watch You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. (The 1985 cartoon, not the stage musical.) It's probably the most profoundly moving incident for Briana in the book and leads to an extended art/dream sequence. I think it's a particularly apt moment. Peanuts in general and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in particular aren't really tied to a specific narrative hook. The characters go through their days -- doing book reports, writing letters, losing ball games, trying to fly a kite... -- with nothing really standing out as a singular 'event.' But, as has been said many times by others, Charles Schulz's genius was in distilling that daily tedium down into reflective and poignant insights about life. And while Briana is perhaps not as verbose as Linus or as energetic as Snoopy or as wishy-washy as Charlie Brown, she still offers a similarly nuanced and yet distilled view of life.

And that's probably the best praise I can offer. Raised by Ghosts has a quiet beauty to it, not in spite of some of the melancholy but because of it. The book doesn't put on rose-colored glasses to review the teenage years. Briana's life isn't brightly colored and virtually the entire story is in a series of regular, almost monotonous four-panel grids. Again, much like Peanuts. We never see Charlie Brown's parents, and his teachers only ever 'appear' in the form of a muted trumpet. The kids are effectively left alone to figure everything out for themselves. And while Schulz was more overt in that suggestion (e.g. Lucy's psychiatry booth, Linus quoting great philosophers, staging their own Christmas pageant entirely by themselves, etc.) Loewinsohn takes a more realistic approach and just has these teens act like teens. They're trying to figure things out, and rely on each other a great deal, but that still makes for a loneyly upbringing. The adults, however concerned or loving they may be, are largely absent. These kids are being raised by ghosts.

The book is due out from Fantagraphics on Feburary 4, 2025. (The publisher provided me with an advance review copy.) It retails for $18.99 US and should be available to order from your favorite comic shop or bookstore. Check it out now, so you won't be confused next year when it winds up with at least an Eisner nomination.

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