“Therapy is a Good Way to Practice Telling Your Own Story”: An Interview with Raina Telgemeier*

Raina Telgemeier: Before we start, I want to say that when I wrote Guts (Fig. 1), my longtime editor, Cassandra's mother, helped me with the psychology. Her mother is a child psychologist. She has worked in high schools and she's worked in the therapy setting. She was my beta reader from that point of view, and she helped me figure out the difference between writing my memories from 1987 and making it feel contemporary for what a kid might find in therapy today.

Vera Camden and Valentino Zullo: I don't think we knew that.

Telgemeier: Well, a lot has changed since 1987, so we had to make sure that the terminology was correct.

Camden and Zullo: We also imagine the tense shift is important: you want it to be in the moment, but you also want to indicate the passage of time. To that point, we want to think about how does your relationship with your readers come up in your work? Is there an imagined reader? Who are you thinking about when you create your works?

Telgemeier: I don't know that there's an imagined reader so much as there's just me wishing that I'd had a book like this when I was nine years old. I found some of what I was looking for in Lynn Johnston's comic strip, For Better or For Worse. The

kids' points of view in the strips really resonated with me. But I'm mostly writing for nine-year-old me. I don't have a hard time putting myself back in that headspace. I've got a pretty photographic memory! I also have old photo albums I can look at, and luckily, my family members are all still alive, so I can still ask them questions