One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary

by Carson Ellis

Award-winning, beloved children's book author and illustrator Carson Ellis makes a stunning adult debut with an illustrated memoir that evocatively captures a specific cultural moment of the early 2000s and in her journey as an artist. In January 2001, the young artist Carson Ellis moved into a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, she kept a detailed diary full of dry observations, mordant wit, hijinks with friends (including her future husband, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy), and turn-of-the-millennium cultural touchstones. Now, Ellis has richly illustrated this two-decade-old journal with extraordinary new paintings in the signature style that has made her an award-winning picture book author today. This beautiful volume offers a snapshot of a bygone era, a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments, and a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later.
Carson Ellis is a Caldecott award-winning author and artist known for her work in the Wildwood Chronicles, The Mysterious Benedict Society, and beyond and the longtime illustrator-in-residence for the band The Decemberists.
“Feels like reading a love story that doesn't quite know it's a love story yet, and a success story that doesn't know it’s made it.”—Emma Straub, New York Times–bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

Genres: Memoir, Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Art, Biography Memoir, Adult, Diary

80 pages, Hardcover

Published September 10, 2024

About the author

Carson Ellis is the author and illustrator of the bestselling picture books Home and Du Iz Tak? (a Caldecott Honor book and the recipient of an E.B. White Read Aloud Award). She has illustrated a number of books for kids including The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, and The Wildwood Chronicles by her husband, Colin Meloy. Carson has been awarded silver medals by the Society of Illustrators for her work on Wildwood Imperium and on Dillweed's Revenge by Florence Parry Heide. She's the illustrator-in-residence for Colin's band, The Decemberists, and received Grammy nominations in 2016 and 2018 for album art design. She works sporadically as an editorial illustrator for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and others publications and exhibits art on occasion. She’s represented by Nationale in Portland.

Carson lives on a farm in Oregon with Colin, their two sons, two cats, one llama, three goats, many chickens, and an unfathomable multitude of tree frogs.

Reviews

[Carolyn Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first read of 2025!

This book, especially its illustrations, was lovely!

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really cool to read, a diary snippet from one of my favorite artists, especially since I went to an art school in Portland several years after this diary was written, climbed to the top of a building on a sketchy ladder, and saw The Decemberists in a square downtown.

[Fien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Voor altijd fan van Carson's prachtige illustratiestijl!!! De teksten lazen wat warrig maar dat is te verwachten als je een dagboek van een angstige 25-jarige leest wat origineel gezien niet bedoeld was voor andere ogen.

Nu ff haar Substack verslinden en procesvideo's van haar illustratiewerk bekijken <3

[kate j · Rating 4 out of 5]

my twenties are okay :) i want to learn to paint, and i want to live in the pacific northwest

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very niche book, but I'm the niche, so I loved it. Like Ellis, I also moved to Portland in the early 2000s. Like Ellis, I made friends, ate bagels, and hung out. It was fun to notice the subtle nuances that her eight days of journal entries caught, like checking your email and being disappointed when there wasn't any.

This is a great time capsule view of being mostly unencumbered, creative, and looking for a place in the world.

[Manon Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want so much for my life to eventually be a success story

Kinda vain to say, but true, and it doesn’t necessarily feel that way now, not completely anyway

It’s nice to see someone I consider a great artist living a life that is fairly simple and confused at my age, makes it feel okay that I don’t know exactly what my life will look like

[Caitlin]

How delightful to read this as a 25 year old woman living in Portland in January. Long live laurelthirst! Your funky folk nights are still beloved decades later

[Delilah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I love this twenty-five-year-old me, and I’m not mad at her for trying too hard. I'm a carefully stoic diarist, but beneath all the flatness and comic tedium runs a true current of sorrow and longing. This is the diary of a young artist with no money and few prospects. She’s just moved into yet another shabby warehouse and she’s in love with her best friend, who appears to be in love with everyone but her. From the outside, things look dismal, but her life is brimming with possibility. Sometimes she even knows it."

I totally & completely loved this. I'd only read interviews about it before today, and was thrilled when my copy arrived in the mail. It weirdly reminded me of Martin Hägglund’s This Life, specifically the bit on Knausgaard, which I read for a class this spring (shoutout). Hägglund talks at length about the act of writing—specifically writing the mundane, the everyday. "One must focus the gaze,” he writes. “Focus your gaze by attaching yourself to what you see.”

One Week in January focuses the gaze intently—on bagels with avocado, on spilled rum, on fake butter and lucky shoes and bad films. Carson Ellis's choice to breathe life into this account of a mundane-seeming week in her life is a beautiful one, validating the voice of her past self as one worthy of artistic collaboration with her current self.

(I hope when I'm in my forties and I look back on my journal from this week in my life, I am struck by my sudden remembrance of the little bits—what I ate for breakfast, when I went to work, who I saw on my evening walk. I hope my forty-year-old self can forget & remember & forget all over again <3)

[Sandra de Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

77 pages of diary and paintings by Carson Ellis. When she first moved to Portland, she kept a diary for one chronicling her daily life. The details of her life were mostly boring, but it was fascinating to read this true story of one week in the life of a woman who is now well known for her art. I would happily read more of the same.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting idea to publish this diary of a random week of life at 25. It got me thinking about what a diary of my life 20 years ago would have looked like. It’s a quick little read but if you are like me it might get you thinking much longer than that. I loved the illustrations and the glimpse into the life of people I have admired from afar for about 20 years or so.

[Jamie Johnson Leach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little journaling experience made me feel like my "feeble" attempts at journaling are actually "normal" and I should keep going even when it feels silly. I love the idea of illustrating journals.

[Karen]

A funny little diary of a long ago week in Portland Oregon, as lived by an artist. The world has changed so much since then, it’s hard not to feel nostalgia and a fair amount of sadness. I’m not sure late capitalism and modern technology has left much room for artists to squat in low-rent buildings and faff about all day being productively bored and creative. Also, twenty-something artistic types are fairly intolerable, and that just seems necessary to create the stuff we love. The pictures are nice to look at, and the overall effect is sort of painful and squicky and miniaturized, through a telescope backwards and darkly.

[Valerie Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"from the outside, things look dismal, but her life is brimming with possibility. Sometimes she even knows it"

there is beauty in simplicity and the everyday life and is so realistically portrayed in the diary entries and paintings throughout this little book. I love taking glimpses into people's lives and with this being so la vie boheme, so broke indie art kids, it really hit me in my soft spot. I want to frame so many of the paintings throughout because they capture a time that isn't directly relatable, but the vibe certainly is

[Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked how this story focused on just one week of the artists life, back in 2001. It is a moment of time captured in detailed but secretive diary entries. The paintings included are beautiful and atmospheric.

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me feel so much. I also love making a record of my life through journals, pictures, art, and the simple and straightforward way Carson Ellis narrates her life held so much depth and really resonated with me. I cried immediately upon finishing— on the eve of getting married, her take on marriage and her ever-changing relationship to her husband was exactly the sentiment I needed to hear. Touching, heartbreaking, seeped in nostalgia and an acute ache for the past… I absolutely loved it.

[John’aLee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not impressed. I am probably not the target audience for a book like this though. Instead of it being about an artist’s creative life in Portland Oregon, it was a nod to the drinking, self-serving life of an individual, with a few snippets of her art life at that time.

[Viktor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple but beautiful, evoking all and every emotion whether I had experienced it or not.

[julianna :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice but meaningless but that’s how your mid twenties should be

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read, more like an adult picture book or graphic novella.
Diary entries from one week in 2001 Portland, OR. Sweet and short reminisces with lovely illustrations.

[Evelyn Moulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah

[Colette Denali · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was lovely, but didn’t quite sing for me. Still, I enjoyed it. I loved Ellis’s epilogue about marriage.

I’ve been a diarist most of my life, but, save an unsuccessful attempt at chronicling a trip to Bismarck, ND for a science fair, I’ve never used my journals to detail my days’ happenings in the way Carson Ellis does.

It was lovely to read but a week was definitely sufficient.

[Cindy Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This illustrated journal is just what it says it is about- one week in January in Ellis’s 20s. The illustrations were lovely- colorful, evocative, and they detailed the story of each moment. The journal entries, unfortunately, were not quite as interesting. I usually don’t mind writing that speaks about mundane, slice of life moments, but it needs to be reflective and beautifully written (these entries were neither of these things). The best writing was actually in the introduction and the acknowledgements (especially her paragraph about what marriage means); both of these sections were written well after the events of this journal. Honestly, this would have been much more interesting if she had only done illustrations and let them “tell” the entire story. I loved the idea behind this project, and I’m glad I gave it a shot; the bits of nostalgia were nice (landline phones, camcorder footage, and taking indie projects to Kinko’s to be printed were a few of my favorites).

[Keelie Grasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I turn 24 in two days and this book made me realize that one day I’ll look back on these years and remember with fondness the poverty and silliness of this time. I am now compelled to journal my mundane and apprehensive 24 year old life to hopefully one day look back on and laugh. I will forever be obsessed with Carson’s illustrations.

[Cynthia Clements · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are long-term Portlander, this book is a delight. The references to bars and venues, remembering the age without phones, and bagels… I too ate bagels constantly, and honestly I sort of forgot about that. Her days felt similar to my experience with friends; “nothing happens” but that’s sort of perfection, isn’t it? I loved the Acknowledgments at the end as well, don’t skip those. It makes you want to call an old friend and dig up photos.

[Literary Redhead · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging diary by a 25-year-old female artist living in Portland in 2001, is enlivened by new paintings. It's amazing how well the diarist captured the era's zeitgeist, as well as the heartbeats of her own life with her touching prose and vibrant art. Recommended!

[lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We expect marriage to be a rock, but I think even in the best circumstances, it's an ocean, with unexplorable depths and shifting tides controlled by the moon. Or perhaps it's two wavelengths moving in and out of sync. We come together; we drift apart; we are so lucky to come together again."

It's pretty rare for me to have enough interest in a graphic novel (or in this case memoir) to pick it up almost immediately. But I thought the concept here was just fascinating, and since, like the Carson Ellis in this story, this is the January of my 26th year, I was intrigued enough to buy it.

Though the art and the book itself are both lovely, the text isn't the most riveting — it literally is just a day-by-day, play-by-play account of a week in Ellis's life. But there's a sweetness to this simplicity, to the desire to capture even the most mundane in a new life stage. Social media and vlogging especially have proved that we are all fascinated by each other's daily realities and obsessed with capturing the moment that we are in. Though written pre-social media, Ellis's diary also reveals something of that desire and her decision to publish it 23 years later makes it all the more relevant.

This was something a little different, and I think that's what I liked most about it. Why shouldn't we exalt everyday life? Ellis proves that it's always leading us somewhere.

[Panda Incognito · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author and artist Carson Ellis has won awards for her work in children's books, and this is her adult debut, based on an old diary that she uncovered. At the time of writing, she was twenty-five and had just moved to Portland. This book features a week's worth of diary entries with accompanying illustrations, capturing a moment in the author's life and a lost era where new move-ins had to battle with the phone company to get landlines properly connected. The book is brief but poignant, particularly related to Ellis's artistic aspirations and unrequited feelings for her friend Colin, who has now been her husband for many years.

This book will be nostalgic and meaningful for many people who relate to the author's experiences, and who came of age at a similar time. However, it's quite short, and the entries themselves are just simple and mundane summaries. The blurbs for this book make it sound much wittier and more profound than it is. It's just a collection of ordinary diary entries that aren't particularly compelling in and of themselves, but reflect a unique time period and convey the experiences of a now-successful artist.

I received a temporary digital copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of my illustrator searching and researching. I found this story to also captures a Portland, Oregon that is long gone for anyone not wealthy (IMHO). But I also have to acknowledge I never loved that city though I tried.

Also did not know who she was and her husband's band getting popular coincided with a major shift and change in my life. So a lovely read, this.

Funny to remember that we once looked forward to getting email.

The paintings are so cool, and I truly love illustrated books these days.

Favorite quote:
"But as far as I can tell, marriages - even the happy ones-are comprised of many heartbreaks. There are lonely distances and fiery schisms. And then there are sudden swells of profound, aching love and happy content-edness. We expect marriage to be a rock, but I think even in the bese circumstances, it's an ocean, with unexplorable depths and shifting rides controlled by the moon. Or perhaps it's two wavelengths moving in and our of sync. We come together; we drift apart; we are so lucky to come together again."

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5/5]

This is a very warm, charming book that captures what it feels like to be a twenty something. This small volume looks back at a fairly mundane week in Carson Ellis’s, mainly spent drinking with friends, eating bagels and making art. The diary entries are accompanied by paintings she’s made in the current day which are, in fact, quite beautiful. There’s a real quality of peace and nostalgia when you look at them. I am particularly moved by the portraits of her husband; there is something romantic about having to draw you partner of so many years as you saw them when you still had a schoolgirl style crush on them. I will say, Carson and crew do give off the exact slightly annoying vibe that Portland hipsters are teased for. With their bar antics and silly fights, they would probably be agitating to sit next to at happy hour, but I guess we’ll forgive them since they are young and foolish. This makes me want to pick journaling back up, but gosh, none of my diary entries are nearly as positive and fuzzy as these.

[Eline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ohh I love love loved this (totally as I expected). The illustrations are so wonderful again and I will forever adore everything Carson Ellis illustrates. When looking at her illustrations I always ~feel~ them and I rarely experience this with other illustrators.
What surprised me is that I also really liked the journal text she wrote. She wrote them around this time in January 2001 when she was 25 years old. I am currently 25 years old and her life was so different from mine: both in everything associated with the 2001-era and in how she arranged her life. I was weirdly (?) fascinated by all the pre-digital era stuff like wanting to go to a store and asking your friend where it was and then not being able to find it, with calling instead of texting friends and with reading so much in the inbetween time.
Overall such a treasure and I’m sure I will look through this again and again in the coming years ♥️