Lynda Barry
Personal Information
Description
Source: Wikipedia: "Lynda Barry (born Linda Jean Barry, January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist, author, and teacher. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published One! Hundred! Demons!, a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". What It Is (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity; it won the comics industry's 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, Comics Alliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition,and she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.In July 2016, she was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame.Barry was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship as part of the Class of 2019.She is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.Early life and education Linda Jean Barry, who changed her first name to "Lynda" at age 12,was born on Highway 14 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.Her father was a meat-cutter of Irish and Norwegian descent, and her mother, a hospital housekeeper, was of Irish and Filipino descent.Barry grew up in Seattle, Washington in a racially mixed working-class neighborhood,and recalls her childhood as difficult and awkward.Her parents divorced when she was 12.By age 16, she was working nights as a janitor at a Seattle hospital while still attending high school, where her classmates included artist Charles Burns.Neither of Barry's parents attended her graduation.[why?]Her mother strongly disapproved of Lynda's love of books and desire to go to college; she said they were a waste of time, and that it was time for Lynda to get a job.At The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Barry met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening.Her career began in 1977when Groening and University of Washington Daily student editor John Keister each published her work without her knowledge in their respective student newspapers, titling it Ernie Pook's ComeekCareer Comics Barry was known as the class cartoonist in her grade school. While studying fine arts at The Evergreen State College, she began drawing comic strips compulsively when her boyfriend left her for another girl: "I couldn't sleep after that, and I started making comic strips about men and women. The men were cactuses and the women were women, and the cactuses were trying to convince the women to go to bed with them, and the women were constantly thinking it over but finally deciding it wouldn't be a good idea." These were the cartoons Groening and Keister published as Ernie Pook's Comeek.Barry also credits her start in comics to Evergreen State professor Marilyn Frasca, saying, "The lessons I learned from her when I was 19 and 20, I still use every day and have never been able to wear out."After graduating from Evergreen, Barry moved to Seattle. When she was 23, the Chicago Reader picked up her comic strip, enabling her to make a living from her comics alone. She later moved to Chicago, Illinois.As she described her career start: [Editor] Bob Roth called me from the Chicago Reader as the result of an article [her college classmate] Matt [Groening] wrote about hip West Coast artists — he threw me in just because he was a buddy, right? And then Bob Roth ... called and wanted to see my comic strips, and I didn't have any originals. I didn't know anything about originals, that you don't give them to newspapers because newspapers lose them. So I had to draw a whole set that night and Federal Express them. So I did, and he started printing them, and he paid $80 a week, and I could live off of that. And because he's with this newspaper association, the other papers started picking it up. So it was luck. Sheer luck. [Matt] got into the Los Angeles Reader. For a long time the Los Angeles Reader wouldn't print me, and the Chicago Reader wouldn't print Matt even though they're sister publications. So we both worked on the publishers and the editors to get each other in. It was really funny: when we got into each others' papers, everything sort of took off for both of us.Collections of her work include Girls & Boys (1981), Big Ideas (1983), Everything in the World (1986), The Fun House (1987), Down the Street (1989), and The Greatest of Marlys (2000). In 1984, she released a coloring book with brief text called Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! She also wrote and drew a full-page color strip examining the everyday pathology of relationships for Esquire magazine. In 1989 Barry's strip appeared weekly in more than 50 publications, mostly alternative newspapers in large cities.Barry has described her process as developing a story while working, not planning it out in advance. In answering a question about her book What It Is in an interview with Michael Dean for The Comics Journal, Barry said: "There were big realizations and small ones. The biggest one was the same one I had when I wrote Cruddy. The realization that the back of the mind can be relied on to create natural story order. It's not something I have to try to do, or think too hard about. If I just work every day on a particular project, it seems to begin to form itself if I keep moving my hands while maintaining a certain state of mind." Due to the loss of weekly newspaper clients, Barry moved her comics primarily online by 2007.Books Collections of Barry's comics began appearing in 1981.She has written two illustrated novels, The Good Times are Killing Me (1988) and Cruddy, also known as Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel (1999). Cruddy is written in the voice of a fictional girl named Roberta Rohbeson, who describes her home as ""the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road" and who ends up in a string of violent adventures with her father. Barry addressed the violence in the book in an interview with Hillary Chute in The Believer, saying: "Cruddy has murder galore. It's, like, you know, it's murder fiesta, and lots of knives and killing. ... So does that mean that I'm a person who thinks about murder? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do think about murder constantly. Actually, when I'm talking to people who are driving me crazy, I often imagine they have an ax in their forehead while they're talking to me. I know that that's my personal relationship with murder and knives and blood. It doesn't mean that I need to go do that." The book was well regarded by critics. Alanna Nash wrote in The New York Times that "the author's ability to capture the paralyzing bleakness of despair, and her uncanny ear for dialogue, make this first novel a work of terrible beauty."In The Austin Chronicle, Stephen MacMillan Moser wrote a review in the form of a letter to Barry, saying "You blew me away. Sometimes I wasn't sure if something was supposed to be funny or not, but I laughed a lot. But I also feel like I got run over by a bus."In 2013, English professor Ellen E. Berry, published a paper focused on the novel titled "Becoming‐Girl/Becoming‐Fly/Becoming‐Imperceptible: Gothic Posthumanism in Lynda Barry's Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel."Berry wrote in her summary of the paper that the book is "a vivid example of what I call 'gothic posthumanism' in which gothic themes and tropes serve to advance an extensive critique of anthropo‐ and other centrisms, all forms of domination, the values of liberal humanism and affirmative conformist culture." Berry analyzes Cruddy using a theory of posthuman ethics articulated by Rosi Braidotti, writing that she used Braidotti's theory "to analyze Roberta's survival strategies and her radically posthuman identification with animals centering on their shared vulnerability and thus their shared goal: to disappear and to survive." Barry adapted The Good Times are Killing Me as an Off-Broadway play (see below). One! Hundred! Demons! first appeared as a serialized comic on Salon.com;according to the book's introduction, it was produced in emulation of an old Zen painting exercise called "one hundred demons." In this exercise, the practitioner awaits the arrival of demons and then paints them as they arise in the mind. The demons Barry wrestles with in this book include regret, abusive relationships, self-consciousness, the prohibition against feeling hate, and her response to the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. The book contains an instructional section that encourages readers to take up the brush and follow her example. According to Time magazine, the book uses "acutely-observed humor to explore the pain of growing up."Barry has also published four books about the creative processes of writing and drawing. Making Comics, What It Is, Picture This, and Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor focus on opening pathways to personal creativity. Publishers Weekly gave Syllabus a starred review, calling it "an excellent guide for those seeking to break out of whatever writing and drawing styles they have been stuck in, allowing them to reopen their brains to the possibility of new creativity."The AV Club named Syllabus one of the best comics of 2014.Other media Barry adapted her illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me (1988) as an off-Broadway play that had 106 performances from March 26 to June 23, 1991, at the McGinn-Cazale Theatre at 2162 Broadway, and 136 performances from July 30 to November 24, 1991, at the Minetta Lane Theatre. It was directed by Mark Brokaw and produced by Second Stage Theatre, with the Minetta Lane portion produced by Concert Productions International. Angela Goethals won a 1990–91 Obie Award for her lead role as Edna Arkins. Chandra Wilson as Bonna Willis won a 1991 Theatre World Award. Barry was nominated for the 1992 Outer Critics Circle's John Gassner Award.In its March–April 1991 issue, Mother Jones published Barry's essay "War", which protested the first Gulf War: "War becomes part of our DNA...How dare anyone purposefully bring it into our lives when other options remain?"Barry had previously read the essay on Chicago Public Radio's program "The Wild Room," which she co-hosted with Ira Glass and Gary Covino.Workshops and teaching Barry offers a workshop titled "Writing the Unthinkable" through the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and The Crossings in Austin, Texas, in which she teaches the process she uses to create all of her work. Barry conducts approximately 15 writing workshops around the country each year.She credits her teacher, Marilyn Frasca at The Evergreen State College, with teaching her these creativity and writing techniques. Many of these techniques appear in her book What It Is.[citation needed] A New York Times article about her writing workshops summed up her technique: "Barry isn't particularly interested in the writer's craft. She's more interested in where ideas come from—and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity."In the spring term of 2012, Barry was artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arts Institute and Department of Art.She taught a class, What It Is: Manually Shifting the Image.She joined the faculty of University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2013 as an assistant professor in the art department and through the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.During September 24–28, 2012, Barry was the artist in residence at Capilano University in North Vancouver, British Columbia.Personal life For a time, Barry dated public-radio personality Ira Glass.She briefly joined him in Washington, D.C., but a few months later, in the summer of 1989, she moved to Chicago to be near fellow cartoonists.Glass followed her there.Reflecting on the relationship, she called it the "worst thing I ever did," and said he told her she "was boring and shallow, and...wasn't enough in the moment for him."She later drew a comic based on their relationship titled "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend", which was later included in her book One! Hundred! Demons!...Glass has not denied her assertions, and told the Chicago Reader, "I was an idiot. I was in the wrong...About so many things with her. Anything bad she says about me I can confirm."Barry is married to Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert.They met while she was an artist in residence at the Ragdale Foundation and he was land manager of the Lake Forest Open Lands project in Lake Forest, Illinois.In 2002 they moved to a dairy farm near Footville, Wisconsin.Barry is an outspoken critic of wind turbines and has lobbied the Wisconsin government for clearer zoning regulations for turbines being built in residential areas.She has also spoken out about wind power's problems with noise pollution, human health, and efficiency as related to variability.In 1994, Barry suffered a near-fatal case of dengue fever.[where?]Published works • Girls and Boys (Real Comet Press 1981) ISBN 0-941104-00-1 • Big Ideas (Real Comet Press 1983) ISBN 0-941104-07-9 • Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies: Coloring Book (Real Comet Press 1984) ISBN 978-0941104135 • Everything in the World (HarperCollins 1986) ISBN 978-0060961077 • Down the Street (HarperCollins 1988) ISBN 978-0060963040 • The Fun House (HarperCollins 1988) ISBN 0-06-096228-3 • The Good Times Are Killing Me (Perennial/HarperCollins, 1988) ISBN 0-941104-22-2 • Come Over, Come Over (HarperCollins 1990) ISBN 0-06-096504-5 • My Perfect Life (Perennial/HarperCollins 1992) ISBN 978-0060965051 • The Lynda Barry Experience (spoken word cassette tape/CD 1993) ISBN 1-882543-17-3 • It's So Magic (Perennial/HarperCollins 1994) ISBN 978-0060950460 • The Freddie Stories (Sasquatch Books 1999) ISBN 978-1570611063 • Cruddy (Simon & Schuster hardcover 1999) ISBN 978-0684865300 (paperback 2000) ISBN 978-0684838465 • The Greatest of Marlys (Sasquatch Books 2000) ISBN 1-57061-260-9 • One! Hundred! Demons! (Sasquatch Books 2002) ISBN 9781570613371 • What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly 2008) ISBN 978-1897299357 • Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (Drawn and Quarterly 2010) ISBN 1-897299-64-8 • Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything (Drawn and Quarterly 2011) ISBN 978-1770460522 • Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly 2014) ISBN 978-1770461611 • The Greatest of Marlys (Drawn and Quarterly hardcover 2016) ISBN 978-1770462649 • Making Comics (Drawn and Quarterly 2019) ISBN 978-1770463691" (Wikipedia source
Books
Cruddy
Fiction, Graphic Novel: A psycho-killer's daughter narrates her gory youth. Disguised as a boy she accompanies her father on his murderous jobs, during which she pretends to be a mute so as not to give away her voice. One of the more memorable tasks is disposing of dead mobsters in a slaughterhouse. On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping acid, a sixteen-year-old curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom and begins to write. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. The girl is Roberta Rohbeson, and her rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road" soon becomes a detailed account of another story, one that she has kept silent since she was eleven. Darkly funny and resonant with humanity, Cruddy, masterfully intertwines Roberta's stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz. These stories, the backbone of Roberta's short life, include a one-way trip across America fueled by revenge and greed and a vivid cast of characters, starring Roberta's dangerous father, the owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar-cum-slaughterhouse, and runaway adolescents. With a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.
My Perfect Life
Fiction, Graphic Novel: In this vividly imagined continuation of her immensely popular Ernie Pook series, extraordinary cartoonist Lynda Barry chronicles the trials and tribulations of Maybonne and her sister, Marlys, as they struggle through their teenage years. Line drawings.
It's So Magic
Two of the inventive cartoonist Barry's most popular characters discover the heartache and pain of being a teenager. "Barry . . . conjures up the essence of life's experiences in her drawings with oddball insight and a perfect ear for the way people talk".--Entertainment Weekly. 128 cartoons.
What It Is
What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or remember. Bursting with full-colour drawings, comics and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance, each page is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: 'The ordinary is extraordinary'. Lynda Barry explores the.... ...depths of the inner and outer realms of creation and imagination, ... ...where play can be serious, ... ...monsters have purpose and ... ...not knowing is an answer unto itself. How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? These types of questions permeate the pages of What It Is, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Her insight and sincerity will tackle the most persistent of inhibitions, calling back every kid who quit drawing to feel alive again at the experiential level. "Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+" -Salon
The Good Times are Killing Me
Fiction, Graphic Novel: Nationally syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry's moving, quirky and honest first novel about a young girl's coming of age--which has also been a hit off-Broadway play--is back in print, with new artwork by the author. In The Good Times Are Killing Me, Lynda Barry reveals her masterful way with story, memory, and feelings, and anyone who lingers in Edna Arkins's world will be the better for it.
Come Over, Come Over
The new collection from cartoonist Lynda Barry, featuring the characters who have become favorites in her recent syndicated features and her popular collection Down the Street.
Picture this
"Paul Stone is an artist. One day, a beautiful woman named Zena walks into his studio. For Paul, it is love at first sight. Zena offers Paul a simple, but strange, job. When Paul takes the job, he steps into a world of trouble. Zena is mixed up with a crook. They are planning to steal three paintings. Paul finds himself dragged into an art theft worth $3 million. As time goes on, Paul learns he is being lied to, even by Zena. Will Paul stick to the plan? Who will end up with the money? And who will go to jail?"--Back cover.
The Greatest of Marlys
Lynda Barry had a bona fide hit with Cruddy, and her fans are now calling for her older comic strips, all out of print. This book answers the call as it delivers the life and times of Marlys Mullen, the most beloved character in Barry's nationally syndicated comic strip, "Ernie Pook's Comeek." This is a Lynda Barry double-tall: the long-awaited collection of the best strips from her syndicated comics. Way back in the mid-1980s, comic illustrator and writer Lynda Barry introduced the character of Marlys Mullen, her crazy groovy teenage sister Maybonne, her sensitive and strange little brother Freddie, a mother like no other, and an array of cousins and friends from the 'hood. This oversized book presents the long strange journey through puberty and life that Marlys and company have experienced. Marlys's universe and galaxy are funny, rude, disturbing, tearful . . . in short, very, very Lynda Barry. Fiction, Graphic Novel: Eight-year-old Marlys Mullen is Lynda Barry's most famous character from her long-running and landmark comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and for good reason! Given her very own collection of strips, Marlys shines in all her freckled and pig-tailed groovy glory. The trailer park where she and her family live is the grand stage for her dramas big and small. Joining Marlys are her teenaged sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, their mother, and an offbeat array of family members, neighbors, and classmates. Marlys's enthusiasm for life knows no bounds. Her childhood is one where the neighborhood kids stay out all night playing kickball; the desire to be popular is unending; bullies are unrepentant; and parents make few appearances. The Greatest Of Marlys spotlights Barry's masterful skill of chronicling childhood through adolescence in all of its wonder, awkwardness, humor, and pain.
One! Hundred! Demons!
"Name that demon!!! Freaky boyfriend! Shouting Moms! Innocence betrayed! Rotten things we've done that will haunt us forever! These are some of the pickled demons Lynda Barry's stories serve up comic-strip style, mixing the true and the un-true into something she calls "autobifictionalography". Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk's painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, and encouraged by a 20th-century editor at Salon.com, Barry's demons jump out of these pages and double-dare you to speak their names." - Provided by Publisher
The best American nonrequired reading, 2003
Everything
Dangerous Masquerade: Shy and sweet, Laurie Evans looks a lot like her glamorous, impulsive cousin LaRaine ... but their personalities are as different as night and day. And now that LaRaine just landed her first movie role, she doesn't have time for Rian Montgomery, her millionaire fiance ... A Land Called Deseret: LaRaine Evans is thrilled with her bit part in a western - until the director fires her without a word of warning. LaRaine has no money and nowhere to go - unless she can talk the tall, good-looking rancher she just met into hiring her as a housekeeper.
Everything in the World
The outrageous humor of cult favorite and syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry--one of the world's "shrewdest chroniclers of sex, love and romance" ~~Mother Jones Cartoons offer a satirical look at first dates, male psychology, friendship, parents, singles bars, sexual harassment, personal grooming, and sleeplessness
The Lynda Barry Experience
Audio CD: Cartoonist, painter and writer Lynda Barry lets loose a cavalcade of stories about her early childhood in Seattle. Some parts of her story are true, some are made up. Her brothers say she makes up a lot of things, which is true.
Girls and Boys
A reissue of the debut collection that catapulted Lynda Barry onto the national scene and established her at the forefront of her generation's cartoonists. Dissecting modern relationships with surgical skills, Girls and Boys is a book-length collection that provides fans with a fascinating glimpse of Barry's early style and her undeniably original talent. Line drawings throughout.
Syllabus
"The syllabus is one of the central documents of academic life, the one thing every teacher needs to write and every student needs to read. Most syllabi begin with a course description, a statement of what the course is about. But how do we get there? How will our students get there? And where is there? This book by William Germano and Kit Nicholls is a field guide to, and collegial chat concerning, this fundamental but often overlooked document. It describes how syllabi work and don't work, offers advice and encouragement to the professor trying to finish yet another syllabus, and reimagines our students' encounters with our syllabi by reconsidering our own relationship to them. Sampling syllabi from a range of disciplines across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Syllabus asks such questions as: what is a reading list, and what is it for? how do we build human time into the semester's clocktime? and can a syllabus be a living thing? Germano and Nicholls argue that at its heart, a syllabus is not really about what students have to know, or what the instructor will do, but what the students will do. A syllabus designed around doing is not only a faster and more effective way to move students toward knowledge, they contend, but also, importantly, an invitation into a community of practice-one that includes the students, the instructor, and countless others who will enter the classroom through readings, images, designs, and theories. Reimagining the syllabus as a sort of constitution-a founding document that creates a community out of a group of disparate individuals-they show that a syllabus is, above all, a privilege and a responsibility, as one of the few forms of writing that can quite directly call others to act"--
Making Comics
Tutorial, Graphic Novels, Memoir: The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus , and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.
The Best American Comics 2008
This newest edition to the Best American Series--"A genuine salute to comics" (Houston Chronicle)--returns with a set of both established and up-and-coming contributors. Editor Lynda Barry and and brand new series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden--acclaimed cartoonists in their own right-- have sought out the best stories culled from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, mini-comics, and the Web to create this cutting-edge collection "perfect for newbies as well as fans"--The San Diego Union Tribune. This newest volume features luminaries like Chris Ware, Seth, and Alison Bechdel alongside Paul Pope's "Batman" and beloved daily cartoonists like Matt Groening. Lynda Barry is a writer and cartoonist whose comic strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” celebrates its 30th year in print in 2007. She is a recipient of the Washington State Governor's Award for her novel, The Good Times are Killing Me, which she adapted into a long-running off-broadway play. The New York Times called her second novel, Cruddy, “A work of terrible beauty”. She received the 2003 William Eisner award for Best Graphic Album and an American Library Association Alex award for her book, One! Hundred! Demons!. She lives and works in southern Wisconsin. Jessica Abel is the author of the graphic novel La Perdida, as well as two collections of stories and drawings from her comic zine Artbabe. Matt Madden is a cartoonist and author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Their textbook about making comics, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, is forthcoming.
The Fun House
Daringly inventive, Lynda Barry has long been recognized as the creator of some of the most original and intelligent cartoon humor in America today. Her latest project is her best yet: a wide-ranging look at childhood.
The Freddie Stories
Here is the first new collection of Lynda Barry's nationally syndicated cartoon strip in more than five years. Lynda Barry, creator of the 'My Life' and 'Ernie Pook's Comeek' comic strips, is syndicated in over 40 alternative weekly newspapers across the country. The Freddie Stories—featuring sisters Marlys and Maybonne, and their spunky little brother Freddie--continues Lynda Barry's brilliant, raw, and completely original exploration of youth, coming of age, friendship, attitude, and being in the world. Another Description: "The Freddie Stories traces a year in the life of Freddie, the youngest member of the dysfunctional Mullen family. These four-panel entries—each representing an episode in the life of Freddie—bring to life adolescence, pimples and all. With consummate skill, Lynda Barry writes about the cruelty of children at this most vulnerable age when the friends they make and the paths they choose can forever change their lives. Every word of dialogue, every piece of narration, and every dark line evokes adolescent angst. The Freddie Stories is an adult tale about just how hard it is to be a teenager, and it’s classic Barry work—poignant, insightful, and true."