Babe in the Woods

Named a Best Fiction Book of 2024 by BookPage ""Breathtaking... otherworldly... [and] characteristically wondrous""--Airmail, ""Best Reads"" ""Babe in the Woods is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward.""--BookPage ""Erudite and amiable... Heffernan takes her time laying out the narrative threads, then lets them echo through one another, painting the rich web of one woman's life. A sumptuous feast for the eyes and the mind.""--Kirkus Reviews In this stunning graphic memoir debut, painter Heffernan sets out with her infant son on a hike that begins in the tradition of the flaneur and ends as a survival story. Their walk in the woods offers plenty of time for contemplation of the past and present. Heffernan addresses her deceased mother and recalls her childhood as the youngest of a large Catholic family, who shared a world of imagination and stories with her closest sister. But Heffernan is unprepared for the wilderness, and the seductive mystery of nature dissolves when she realizes she is lost and will have to spend the night outdoors with her baby. After her initial panic, she finds an inner resolve that propels her toward survival (and the nearest highway). The work is a love letter to the strange, intimate, and ecstatic wrung from everyday life. Heffernan's detailed, finely wrought pages are punctuated with her own bright, surreal paintings, as well as those by the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, El Greco, and Vermeer. As Heffernan shows, the imagination requires care and attention--much like nature. This vivid narrative is a breathtaking homage to both.--Publishers Weekly ""I've admired Julie Heffernan's sublime paintings for decades. Babe in the Woods is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it. Brilliant, engaging and elegant!""--Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing is Monsters ""Visual and emotional narrative dynamite. Julie Heffernan's vision, artwork, and paintings are dazzling, masterful, deep, evocative, irreverent, and lush as she travels the world of the collective unconscious. She is a very, very special soul and artist.""--David O. Russell, award-winning filmmaker ""This is unlike any book I've ever read: enchanting. It's funny, and angry and political, full of grief, and beauty, and hope--and it's weird, and beautiful and full of mystery. It's a hero's journey where the hero is a female artist, a wife and mother with a baby strapped to her chest who is searching for a new, more authentic way to be in the world.""--Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me, co-founder of Tin House magazine ""Giotto and Georgia O'Keeffe are not going to give us graphic novels, but another great painter has: Julie Heffernan. Her reverie about getting lost in the woods with a baby strapped to her is many kinds of beauty: the sheer visual beauty of her paintings and drawings here, the beauty of introspection and of the brilliant exposition of a reverie during a walk that went too far into the unknown. Or just far enough to find those things that can be found no other way.""--Rebecca Solnit, award-winning author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost ""Julie Heffernan's mind-bending journey into a graphic cosmos of beauty, strange nightmares, and sublime fantastical visionary brilliance is a trip anyone will love taking.""--Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist ""I love this! My words cannot do it justice.""--Roz Chast, bestselling author of Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? and I Must Be Dreaming