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Imagine Wanting Only This
A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief
When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America’s past.
A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke’s stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series)
When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America’s past.
A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke’s stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series)
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 18, 2017
About the author
Kristen Radtke
7 books259 followersKristen Radtke is a writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn. Her graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, is forthcoming from Pantheon Books in April.
She is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film & video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
She is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film & video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 711 reviews
October 19, 2017
Who does that? Who steals pictures and re-draws, steals a story without knowing someone and not asking, steals a true art that the author obviously just doesn't get?
My son was portrayed in this book. The author didn't even know him. My son was Seth Thomas - the one this author became obsessed with after she stole pictures of him and pictures that he had taken that his family and friends had left to memorialize him at Gary Methodist Church. His friends, sister and cousin often went back looking for those pictures.
It's quite unfortunate that Kristen Radtke didn't bother to reach out to any of my son's family or friends before writing this book. If she had then perhaps the book would have had a much needed touch of humanity and empathy. As is this book is beyond hollow. The write appears to have no soul.
To use my son's story and to audaciously comment as to why he was killed by a train and to use his last picture shows the sense of entitlement that the author appears to have. Who is she that she thinks just because she stole his pictures that his story can become part of her own?
While obviously this is highly personal to me and to the rest of Seth's family and friends I'm curious as to how others would feel if Seth was their own family. This isn't cool like the author thinks it is. It shows a narcissism/entitlement that is indescribable and beyond sad.
My son was portrayed in this book. The author didn't even know him. My son was Seth Thomas - the one this author became obsessed with after she stole pictures of him and pictures that he had taken that his family and friends had left to memorialize him at Gary Methodist Church. His friends, sister and cousin often went back looking for those pictures.
It's quite unfortunate that Kristen Radtke didn't bother to reach out to any of my son's family or friends before writing this book. If she had then perhaps the book would have had a much needed touch of humanity and empathy. As is this book is beyond hollow. The write appears to have no soul.
To use my son's story and to audaciously comment as to why he was killed by a train and to use his last picture shows the sense of entitlement that the author appears to have. Who is she that she thinks just because she stole his pictures that his story can become part of her own?
While obviously this is highly personal to me and to the rest of Seth's family and friends I'm curious as to how others would feel if Seth was their own family. This isn't cool like the author thinks it is. It shows a narcissism/entitlement that is indescribable and beyond sad.
December 7, 2019
I added something at th need from my original review, of August 2017:
“Nothing but the dead and dying in my little town”—Paul Simon
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”—U2
I read this, a graphic memoir by a young woman in her twenties, in one sitting today. Then looked more carefully through it. It made me think about myself a bit. This is the story of a woman whose uncle died, who broke up with her boyfriend, went traveling to see ruins all over the planet, got into the premier MFA non-fiction program at Iowa so she could write about it, may have her family’s rare congenital heart problem, and realized that she is 1) basically alone and 2) that we are all one way or the other dying, in a kind of theoretical ruins. She writes well, and poetically, though it looks like she is trying really really hard to have something really meaningful to say and. . . .
I am a teacher of writers, some of them MA students, and myself have an MFA. This story seems familiar to me. I am like her a person of privilege, certainly, a white guy, with the opportunity to read and write and travel, and this story is a story of a privileged young white woman with the means to travel the globe to reflect on ruins. She even gets that this is who she is, and shares reflections on it here and there. She’s unhappy, and I feel pretty strongly that this is a story of a time in her life where she has not found what she is looking for: permanence, such as one can find in Italy where they care about the past, and ruins.
She’s trying to make sense of her life, as we all are, I guess, trying to connect the dots between dead family members, family health conditions, broken relationships, poisoned sheep, the Peshigo fire, a nun relative who may be a saint, connecting the dots, yes, as if making a poem out of her life, which is a cool idea. But it falls short for me in feeling really as deep as she intends. It feels a bit manufactured as opposed to truly meaningful. I'm not all that sympathetic with her, in spite of all the hardships she may be facing, because the privilege seems to just be central. And the work she uses, she found, she stole, she lost. . . was the work hers? Surely not. Surely an appropriation of something she knows less about than the artist/photographer she encounters and uses.
I read what I just wrote and think it reads as harsh, ungenerous, but there it is. There are lots of (literal) open spaces in this book for reflection, and this is good. I like the delicate reflective digital artwork pretty well. It’s pretty, it’s inviting, and not for me.
December 2019:
But I have now read the review from the mother of the photographer whose work she used and feel less generous than I initially did; if you read this book, please read her review, too. I now think if young people read the book they should know where it came from, a place of privilege and emptiness:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
“Nothing but the dead and dying in my little town”—Paul Simon
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”—U2
I read this, a graphic memoir by a young woman in her twenties, in one sitting today. Then looked more carefully through it. It made me think about myself a bit. This is the story of a woman whose uncle died, who broke up with her boyfriend, went traveling to see ruins all over the planet, got into the premier MFA non-fiction program at Iowa so she could write about it, may have her family’s rare congenital heart problem, and realized that she is 1) basically alone and 2) that we are all one way or the other dying, in a kind of theoretical ruins. She writes well, and poetically, though it looks like she is trying really really hard to have something really meaningful to say and. . . .
I am a teacher of writers, some of them MA students, and myself have an MFA. This story seems familiar to me. I am like her a person of privilege, certainly, a white guy, with the opportunity to read and write and travel, and this story is a story of a privileged young white woman with the means to travel the globe to reflect on ruins. She even gets that this is who she is, and shares reflections on it here and there. She’s unhappy, and I feel pretty strongly that this is a story of a time in her life where she has not found what she is looking for: permanence, such as one can find in Italy where they care about the past, and ruins.
She’s trying to make sense of her life, as we all are, I guess, trying to connect the dots between dead family members, family health conditions, broken relationships, poisoned sheep, the Peshigo fire, a nun relative who may be a saint, connecting the dots, yes, as if making a poem out of her life, which is a cool idea. But it falls short for me in feeling really as deep as she intends. It feels a bit manufactured as opposed to truly meaningful. I'm not all that sympathetic with her, in spite of all the hardships she may be facing, because the privilege seems to just be central. And the work she uses, she found, she stole, she lost. . . was the work hers? Surely not. Surely an appropriation of something she knows less about than the artist/photographer she encounters and uses.
I read what I just wrote and think it reads as harsh, ungenerous, but there it is. There are lots of (literal) open spaces in this book for reflection, and this is good. I like the delicate reflective digital artwork pretty well. It’s pretty, it’s inviting, and not for me.
December 2019:
But I have now read the review from the mother of the photographer whose work she used and feel less generous than I initially did; if you read this book, please read her review, too. I now think if young people read the book they should know where it came from, a place of privilege and emptiness:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
August 31, 2017
This is a beautiful and haunting book about life, death, and the places we leave behind.
Kristen Radtke has traveled around the United States and the world looking at ruins and abandoned towns, including Colorado, Indiana, Iceland, and the Philippines. This work is a blend of stories of her trips and of her personal history, illustrated with evocative black-and-white drawings.
"I felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter. I didn't care where we were going as long as it was someplace new."
The most moving element of the book is the theme of loss. Kristen writes movingly about losing a beloved uncle who died from a genetic heart condition. She also shares the ups and downs of her relationship with a fellow artist, and of her own artistic dreams.
Truly, this is a lovely work. I read it in one sitting, completely absorbed in her writing and the drawings. It's a melancholy book, but at a time when it feels like so many of our traditional institutions are falling apart, it also felt like the right book to read. Highly recommended for those who like graphic memoirs.
Favorite Quote
"We forget that everything will become no longer ours. War comes, or quakes or wind or water; industry leaves. It doesn't matter that your feet are touching the ground they're touching now. The floors will rot, the carpet will be torn out, the cement will crack and shift and be pulled from the earth, the dirt will be tilled and changed and rained away, and someday there will be nothing left that you have ever touched. Who knows which pieces will matter?"
Kristen Radtke has traveled around the United States and the world looking at ruins and abandoned towns, including Colorado, Indiana, Iceland, and the Philippines. This work is a blend of stories of her trips and of her personal history, illustrated with evocative black-and-white drawings.
"I felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter. I didn't care where we were going as long as it was someplace new."
The most moving element of the book is the theme of loss. Kristen writes movingly about losing a beloved uncle who died from a genetic heart condition. She also shares the ups and downs of her relationship with a fellow artist, and of her own artistic dreams.
Truly, this is a lovely work. I read it in one sitting, completely absorbed in her writing and the drawings. It's a melancholy book, but at a time when it feels like so many of our traditional institutions are falling apart, it also felt like the right book to read. Highly recommended for those who like graphic memoirs.
Favorite Quote
"We forget that everything will become no longer ours. War comes, or quakes or wind or water; industry leaves. It doesn't matter that your feet are touching the ground they're touching now. The floors will rot, the carpet will be torn out, the cement will crack and shift and be pulled from the earth, the dirt will be tilled and changed and rained away, and someday there will be nothing left that you have ever touched. Who knows which pieces will matter?"
May 28, 2017
I was expecting something introspective, but not this blatantly pretentious. I really appreciate the pacing, the carefully chosen bits of life Radtke shows, balancing the mundane with the profound quite well, but there's not much you can do when you don't like the main character. The version of herself Radtke puts out there is one of a privileged intellectual who imagines herself as deep, but is, in actuality, contributing nothing new. This turned me off as with each new chapter I grew more annoyed by the narrator. Not everyone will have this problem, I'm sure, but all the self-importance really put a damper on my enjoyment.
May 18, 2017
I went into this with too much expectation and excitement. I thought it was going to be a visually beautiful memoir and it was but it was also empty. The author is obsessed with ruin and decay and tells us nothing else. I walk away with the feeling she has nothing to say but wrote a book anyway with interesting graphics to fill in the gaps.
November 6, 2019
So the two ways I'm seeing this reviewed are: "It's a beautiful meditation on existential angst," and "It's pretentious navel-gazing by a privileged white woman." I don't know that its being the latter necessarily cancels out its being the former, though. And there is the additional issue of how sticky it feels to read particularly venomous take-downs of this kind of emotionally naked work, especially when it's by women, especially when that work is explicitly the memoir of someone who was quite young when the story took place.
Is it ever a valid, or even productive, or even interesting condemnation of a memoir to call it self-absorbed? The whole engine of that critique feels like it needs its oil changed, for me. Self-absorption can be a price to pay on the road to self-awareness, and I find a burgeoning self-awareness--or the documented struggle for it--to be a pretty engaging storyline. Whether the author knows she's struggling or not.
The ethical issue at the heart of this book is Radtke's theft and eventual loss of some photographs from a young man's memorial (she does not know this is what they are when she takes them, but when she finds out, she remains fairly coolly detached about the fact, and makes no effort to reverse the error). It is the hardest part of her story. The man who died--Seth Thomas--was very young, and his family is still here. Some of them read this book. Radtke didn't alert them before it came out.
Certainly, there will come a time when you have touched nothing on the earth. But we're not there yet.
Is it ever a valid, or even productive, or even interesting condemnation of a memoir to call it self-absorbed? The whole engine of that critique feels like it needs its oil changed, for me. Self-absorption can be a price to pay on the road to self-awareness, and I find a burgeoning self-awareness--or the documented struggle for it--to be a pretty engaging storyline. Whether the author knows she's struggling or not.
The ethical issue at the heart of this book is Radtke's theft and eventual loss of some photographs from a young man's memorial (she does not know this is what they are when she takes them, but when she finds out, she remains fairly coolly detached about the fact, and makes no effort to reverse the error). It is the hardest part of her story. The man who died--Seth Thomas--was very young, and his family is still here. Some of them read this book. Radtke didn't alert them before it came out.
Certainly, there will come a time when you have touched nothing on the earth. But we're not there yet.
August 27, 2017
In Imagine Wanting Only This, Kristen Radtke attempts to grapple with her grief over the death of her beloved uncle, her uncertainties about her own health, and her general restlessness by examining large-scale ruins: the abandonment and decay of entire towns; a horrific firestorm in Wisconsin; an erupting volcano in Iceland that buries a town in lava; the possibility of the complete submergence of New York City as a result of global warming. Connecting your own struggles to things much larger than yourself is a tricky business. Sure, authors do it all the time—it's the reason a term like "pathetic fallacy" even exists. Still, there's something immature and self-centered about it, and as a way of dealing with personal grief and suffering it's wholly inadequate; it seems to make Radtke's suffering more self-absorbed and less universal than she was probably aiming for. It's hard not to think that the day is going to come when she realizes that her personal struggles had little to do with the firestorms and erupting volcanoes she seems obsessed with, and that focusing on all of that was a hindrance to her understanding rather than a help.
Imagine Wanting Only This is worth reading. The art is wonderful, the narrative is interesting, and there's a lot to contemplate. Ultimately, though, this is less a genuine path through the dark woods than a beautifully illustrated detour.
Imagine Wanting Only This is worth reading. The art is wonderful, the narrative is interesting, and there's a lot to contemplate. Ultimately, though, this is less a genuine path through the dark woods than a beautifully illustrated detour.
May 3, 2017
Please note, my feelings about this book are out of step with the critical and popular consensus. First, the image on the cover (which appears in the narrative) isn't possible. There's no spot inside Detroit Metro airport that yields a view of the Detroit skyline, and to get this particular arrangement of buildings, one has to be across the river in Windsor. Minor complaint? Yeah, maybe, but given that the book is so sincerely grounded in documentary and a strong sense of place - particularly abandoned places - with architecturally precise renderings of settlements and post-human ruins, taking poetic license for creative geography on the cover feels a violation. There's a cool emotional distancing throughout the book that's emphasized by the precise linework that unfortunately strays toward the clipart-esque. The narrator is frequently emotionally detached, from people, from herself, from the abandoned places she documents. There are some stirring epiphanies about humanity's relationship with its own creations as it seeks an illusory sense of permanence in the world in the final pages that are haiku-like in their profundity. To get there, though, takes patience with some cold, emotionally opaque memoir that is not my cup of tea.
June 12, 2017
To abandon something beautiful is where the crime rests.
If this quote from the book is true, then the author is guilty of this crime, both when speaking as the main character in this book and as its writer and illustrator. Because this book was on the edge of becoming something beautiful if only the author had gone further, beyond honesty to the truth. Maybe that sounds odd since shouldn't honesty and the truth be one and the same? Not necessarily. Honesty comes from an individual and is colored by his viewpoint, whereas the truth is more universal and objective. But enough of semantics and philosophy for now. Here's what I thought of this graphic novel.
It contained a melancholy and poetic story of loss, both its inevitability and the need to understand how to live with it. The illustrations were masterful, black and white drawings with every shade of gray in between, nearly photorealistic, at times. At other times, the author/illustrator blended comic book style art with real photos that were aged. This accomplished a layering of what was real with what was unreal, same as the story.
I read this book mostly in one sitting, not because it was a page turner so much as the fact that I needed to follow the journey the author had laid out to see where it led, with me hoping it would be to a place that was somewhere brighter and more comforting than where it began. But my heart sank when I came to realize this was not the author's intent. What she has created here with her memoir in graphic novel form is a memento mori, a reflection on mortality, the impermanence of life and its pursuits and of all that we touch along the way. Not a cheery thing to contemplate, especially when the author failed to go beyond this level to discover what is permanent in life, such as the effects we can have on one another. We are mortal and transient, but we live on in spirit and we often influence those we have touched, even as cities crumble around us or are buried or rot and property is destroyed, and people are done in by violence, disasters, and wars, or the fragility of their own bodies. It's not the skyscrapers that we build which are important, but the relationships that we build.
How I wished to see some enlightenment in this book along those terms instead of everything balanced against it. People, however briefly they pass through our lives, can be a fulcrum to help lift what seems an impossible weight, and we can return the favor to help lift the burdens they carry. But the author as the main character here avoids these ideas, just as she avoids feeling connected, perhaps to avoid loss, and is ironically burdened by loss because of it.
But there is a reason for all the moroseness in this book. Based on the author's life up until around the time she was in her mid-twenties, this book begins when she was a young girl and forming a strong relationship with her uncle Dan who like many in their family suffered from a congenital heart abnormality that often proved fatal early on, even with treatment. Dan was more than a warm and loving uncle to Kristen. He was her friend and someone to be admired for his upbeat outlook, despite a serious health condition that could claim him at any time. And it did claim him when he was only in his thirties, his death having a profound affect on Kristen and her life choices. It also began her fascination with places left in ruins around the world. She left everything behind to document them, hoping to find answers about life and how to live with a possible ticking time bomb in her own body. But did she find answers or more questions?
Someday there will be nothing left that you have touched...Who knows which pieces will matter.
I don't quite know what to take away from this book. It made my heart heavy for the author if she truly felt this way. Why do anything, why build anything, physically or emotionally, if nothing is permanent and will turn to dust, no one remembering us in due time? This book gave no answers to any of this. What I took away from it was a sense of giving up, which floors me since the author's Uncle Dan never did. Perhaps a book on his life would have been more productive. Still, the author was honest in presenting what she felt at the time. In this day and age, honesty is of great value, so for this and her skillful illustrations, I applaud her and rate this book four stars. It sure is sad, though. Beware.
If this quote from the book is true, then the author is guilty of this crime, both when speaking as the main character in this book and as its writer and illustrator. Because this book was on the edge of becoming something beautiful if only the author had gone further, beyond honesty to the truth. Maybe that sounds odd since shouldn't honesty and the truth be one and the same? Not necessarily. Honesty comes from an individual and is colored by his viewpoint, whereas the truth is more universal and objective. But enough of semantics and philosophy for now. Here's what I thought of this graphic novel.
It contained a melancholy and poetic story of loss, both its inevitability and the need to understand how to live with it. The illustrations were masterful, black and white drawings with every shade of gray in between, nearly photorealistic, at times. At other times, the author/illustrator blended comic book style art with real photos that were aged. This accomplished a layering of what was real with what was unreal, same as the story.
I read this book mostly in one sitting, not because it was a page turner so much as the fact that I needed to follow the journey the author had laid out to see where it led, with me hoping it would be to a place that was somewhere brighter and more comforting than where it began. But my heart sank when I came to realize this was not the author's intent. What she has created here with her memoir in graphic novel form is a memento mori, a reflection on mortality, the impermanence of life and its pursuits and of all that we touch along the way. Not a cheery thing to contemplate, especially when the author failed to go beyond this level to discover what is permanent in life, such as the effects we can have on one another. We are mortal and transient, but we live on in spirit and we often influence those we have touched, even as cities crumble around us or are buried or rot and property is destroyed, and people are done in by violence, disasters, and wars, or the fragility of their own bodies. It's not the skyscrapers that we build which are important, but the relationships that we build.
How I wished to see some enlightenment in this book along those terms instead of everything balanced against it. People, however briefly they pass through our lives, can be a fulcrum to help lift what seems an impossible weight, and we can return the favor to help lift the burdens they carry. But the author as the main character here avoids these ideas, just as she avoids feeling connected, perhaps to avoid loss, and is ironically burdened by loss because of it.
But there is a reason for all the moroseness in this book. Based on the author's life up until around the time she was in her mid-twenties, this book begins when she was a young girl and forming a strong relationship with her uncle Dan who like many in their family suffered from a congenital heart abnormality that often proved fatal early on, even with treatment. Dan was more than a warm and loving uncle to Kristen. He was her friend and someone to be admired for his upbeat outlook, despite a serious health condition that could claim him at any time. And it did claim him when he was only in his thirties, his death having a profound affect on Kristen and her life choices. It also began her fascination with places left in ruins around the world. She left everything behind to document them, hoping to find answers about life and how to live with a possible ticking time bomb in her own body. But did she find answers or more questions?
Someday there will be nothing left that you have touched...Who knows which pieces will matter.
I don't quite know what to take away from this book. It made my heart heavy for the author if she truly felt this way. Why do anything, why build anything, physically or emotionally, if nothing is permanent and will turn to dust, no one remembering us in due time? This book gave no answers to any of this. What I took away from it was a sense of giving up, which floors me since the author's Uncle Dan never did. Perhaps a book on his life would have been more productive. Still, the author was honest in presenting what she felt at the time. In this day and age, honesty is of great value, so for this and her skillful illustrations, I applaud her and rate this book four stars. It sure is sad, though. Beware.
July 23, 2017
A depressed young white woman moves from location to location and picks up local culture--sometimes literally stealing it, sometimes wandering through as an ill-equipped, uninformed tourist. She sees her own story and problems everywhere and makes representations of her problems out of other people's places and practices. The book would be an indictment of white women's obliviousness and tendency for appropriation, if only the protagonist/author were aware that she were doing those things.
The author can't "Imagine Wanting Only This" because she can't see beyond herself. Some of that can be attributed to depression, but an attempt to understand others on their own terms would have helped the work feel less like a self-absorbed, joyless tomb raid.
The author can't "Imagine Wanting Only This" because she can't see beyond herself. Some of that can be attributed to depression, but an attempt to understand others on their own terms would have helped the work feel less like a self-absorbed, joyless tomb raid.
May 21, 2017
Even though the memoirist only does a couple of middling-bad awful things, I spent each page I read hating her more and more. Her endless navel-gazing and crap profundity make her narcissistic and shallow in my eyes.
August 30, 2017
The death of the author's youngest uncle propels her to explore ruins.
It's not good. She goes on these ruminations about what we've done or how we react or search for the past. I don't relate to it at all. The first place she explores is Gary, Indiana. It's not abandoned, but much like Detroit and the other ruins she talks about, it's more about the absence of white people. Gary, Indiana has a black population over 80%. White people left in the 1960s as steel industry declined and now young white people, like the author, explore it as if it's devoid of human life for hundreds of years. That kept me on the outside of this book. Also, in Gary she takes some photos from an empty church and it turns out to belong to a memorial of an artsy young man like herself. She makes this theft about herself and never attempts to return it anyone.
I couldn't help but think of how this book centered a white American perspective without interrogating it, like the ruins and death of Southeast Asia but no discussion of America's involvement in the area since World War 2. The only time she explores how these ruins are man-made is the chapter on the Peshtigo fire and how it connected to how during World War 2 American forces used what they knew to study incendiary devices and chemicals and how it led to firebombing Dresden and Tokyo and napalm. It's only when she looks at abandoned mining towns in Colorado and talk with people that left that she finds now mystery or romanticism, but people that had poisoned their own hometown with arsenic and lead. In the final chapter, she talk about how we fantasize about disaster, but who is this we she is talking about because I didn't agree with her narrative.
Also, the art is simple black and white computer-generated rotoscope-like. It forces you to pay attention to small details because otherwise it could blend together. I feel that it is cold and distances me from the memoir as a reader.
It's not good. She goes on these ruminations about what we've done or how we react or search for the past. I don't relate to it at all. The first place she explores is Gary, Indiana. It's not abandoned, but much like Detroit and the other ruins she talks about, it's more about the absence of white people. Gary, Indiana has a black population over 80%. White people left in the 1960s as steel industry declined and now young white people, like the author, explore it as if it's devoid of human life for hundreds of years. That kept me on the outside of this book. Also, in Gary she takes some photos from an empty church and it turns out to belong to a memorial of an artsy young man like herself. She makes this theft about herself and never attempts to return it anyone.
I couldn't help but think of how this book centered a white American perspective without interrogating it, like the ruins and death of Southeast Asia but no discussion of America's involvement in the area since World War 2. The only time she explores how these ruins are man-made is the chapter on the Peshtigo fire and how it connected to how during World War 2 American forces used what they knew to study incendiary devices and chemicals and how it led to firebombing Dresden and Tokyo and napalm. It's only when she looks at abandoned mining towns in Colorado and talk with people that left that she finds now mystery or romanticism, but people that had poisoned their own hometown with arsenic and lead. In the final chapter, she talk about how we fantasize about disaster, but who is this we she is talking about because I didn't agree with her narrative.
Also, the art is simple black and white computer-generated rotoscope-like. It forces you to pay attention to small details because otherwise it could blend together. I feel that it is cold and distances me from the memoir as a reader.
August 14, 2017
I'm not sure what put me off this one.
Was it the author's obvious dissatisfaction, or lack of enthusiasm for her own life, or the fact that she really doesn't have much of a story to tell?
Who knows . . . but it was the most BLAH graphic memoir I've ever read.
Was it the author's obvious dissatisfaction, or lack of enthusiasm for her own life, or the fact that she really doesn't have much of a story to tell?
Who knows . . . but it was the most BLAH graphic memoir I've ever read.
October 1, 2017
1.5 stars. This was a huge disappointment. Radtke is clearly a gifted artist, and has the makings of a talented writer. Her mash-up of memoir, family medical history and historical/social commentary has received accolades in the comics world but I found that her lack of self-awareness and inability to examine and critique her privileged white, middle-class upbringing made her treatment of the subject of urban ruin and decay in contemporary America pretty superficial. She mentions "ruin porn" dismissively yet succumbs to the same sort of romanticization in her own work -- her gaze lingers over the wreckage of abandoned mining towns and once-vibrant Midwest cities like Gary, Indiana and Detroit, Michigan without considering what led to their decline in any meaningful way.
One of the most telling episodes comes early in the book -- in college, she and her boyfriend enter a derelict cathedral in Gary, Indiana and discover a number of photographs strewn around the wreckage. She decides to collect them for an art project. At home later on the Internet, she discovers that these photographs were left as part of a memorial to a young man and photographer who was obsessed with documenting the ruins of Gary, and was killed by a train while taking pictures one night. Her boyfriend feels bad and says, I knew we shouldn't have taken them. What does she do? Proceeds to put them in a bag in her house, where they moulder in a closet for years. Then she takes them to Europe with her and accidentally loses them. It's selfish, disrespectful and entitled -- much like her take on contemporary urban ruins in general.
One of the most telling episodes comes early in the book -- in college, she and her boyfriend enter a derelict cathedral in Gary, Indiana and discover a number of photographs strewn around the wreckage. She decides to collect them for an art project. At home later on the Internet, she discovers that these photographs were left as part of a memorial to a young man and photographer who was obsessed with documenting the ruins of Gary, and was killed by a train while taking pictures one night. Her boyfriend feels bad and says, I knew we shouldn't have taken them. What does she do? Proceeds to put them in a bag in her house, where they moulder in a closet for years. Then she takes them to Europe with her and accidentally loses them. It's selfish, disrespectful and entitled -- much like her take on contemporary urban ruins in general.
December 30, 2017
I'm not sure where to begin. I think a fellow Goodreads user captures a lot of my feelings in the first line of their review: "A depressed young white woman moves from location to location and picks up local culture--sometimes literally stealing it, sometimes wandering through as an ill-equipped, uninformed tourist." I also felt like I was reading "a self-absorbed, joyless tomb raid" (literally. The author's theft of items from Seth Thomas' memorial, plus her repeated invocation of his memory based on nothing except a newspaper article and a lot of projection, is unsettling and disrespectful). The only things I'll add are that images read a lot like clip art, and the way the author describes the history of devastated places fails to give any proper acknowledgment of how colonialism, gentrification, and other dynamics of social injustice contribute to the ruins she... explores? hijacks? renders without so much of a passing nod to the genocide that some of these places hold the violence of? If you're looking for illustrated treatments of grief, loss, and depression, there are others out there with far more self-reflection, and less of the imperialism of white woman tourism.
August 14, 2018
A truly beautiful memoir – the title, Imagine Wanting Only This, is haunting enough to carry you through on its own.
March 15, 2017
My favorite book of 2017 so far. A must-read for fans of Adrian Tomine, Danica Novgorodoff, Craig Thompson, Daniel Clowes, etc.
April 20, 2017
I don't really even know how to begin this to be honest. I'm just going to sort of ramble.
I feel like Radtke took something I hesitantly think about too often (how temporary mankind's time on earth is both individual and societal, what is left behind) and made me stare at it head on with no sunglasses and nothing to distract me. And instead of doing what many other writers may do where they find ways to comfort you, she just was like... Yep. So there's that. And we all keep going on, because that's all you can really do.
But then in one way it was comforting because Radtke didn't try to turn this into a poetic and monumental moral message... she just invited you into her head. It was nice just to wander with her through all of her musings and attempts to bring meaning and authority to things that probably had no meaning. There were moments where I could see myself so vividly in her and it felt strange to see pieces of me on someone else's page, and moments where I just enjoyed peaking into seeing how other people comprehend and make sense of life.
Also, the writing is gorgeous and really works well with the panels. Somehow Radtke captures an aching quiet while at the same time pouring restlessness into you as you're reading and I think the simplistic nature of the art helped with that.
AND UGH. Part of me wants a print of the cover because it fits the book SO WELL, but part of me can't handle seeing that every day.
I feel like Radtke took something I hesitantly think about too often (how temporary mankind's time on earth is both individual and societal, what is left behind) and made me stare at it head on with no sunglasses and nothing to distract me. And instead of doing what many other writers may do where they find ways to comfort you, she just was like... Yep. So there's that. And we all keep going on, because that's all you can really do.
But then in one way it was comforting because Radtke didn't try to turn this into a poetic and monumental moral message... she just invited you into her head. It was nice just to wander with her through all of her musings and attempts to bring meaning and authority to things that probably had no meaning. There were moments where I could see myself so vividly in her and it felt strange to see pieces of me on someone else's page, and moments where I just enjoyed peaking into seeing how other people comprehend and make sense of life.
Also, the writing is gorgeous and really works well with the panels. Somehow Radtke captures an aching quiet while at the same time pouring restlessness into you as you're reading and I think the simplistic nature of the art helped with that.
AND UGH. Part of me wants a print of the cover because it fits the book SO WELL, but part of me can't handle seeing that every day.
October 14, 2017
I read this last night all in one sitting. The art was OK, but the story didn’t seem to fit together very well. Was it about her uncle or the man whose memorial they found? Was it about the decay of middle America or mining towns out West? The family history about the woman who saved people from the Peshtigo Fire? All of these are interesting on their own, but she didn’t get them to fit together into a cohesive narrative.
September 19, 2017
The thing about navel gazing is that it's only interesting to the person with the navel being gazed at.
This is a graphic memoir about a twenty-something woman who is mourning the death of a beloved uncle. She somehow connects ruins and dilapidated places with this loss, and the book is her working through all her feelings. The art is really good, but the book itself felt pointless, almost like a final project for her MFA. If not for the art I would have bailed on this one, so for the art alone I'll add an additional star.
This is a graphic memoir about a twenty-something woman who is mourning the death of a beloved uncle. She somehow connects ruins and dilapidated places with this loss, and the book is her working through all her feelings. The art is really good, but the book itself felt pointless, almost like a final project for her MFA. If not for the art I would have bailed on this one, so for the art alone I'll add an additional star.
Read
September 14, 2017A gorgeous graphic memoir about life, loss, architecture, ruins, history, and humans. When her uncle dies, Kristen Radtke sees a deserted city and becomes obsessed. She journeys across the globe looking for places that people came, saw, conquered, and left behind. Life is impermanent. Our footprints are only around for a little while. Imagine Wanting Only This is the tale of those places.
— Ashley Holstrom
from The Best Books We Read In May 2017: https://bookriot.com/2017/06/02/riot-...
— Ashley Holstrom
from The Best Books We Read In May 2017: https://bookriot.com/2017/06/02/riot-...
May 12, 2017
I somehow can't resist my own catty retort to the title's directive: I wanted this book to be more than it was, so I was left with the dissatisfaction of not having imagined wanting only this but then getting just that.
It held such promise: the illustrations were appealing, and I was responsive to the mental space of the main character even though her mobility without reference to any socioeconomic friction wasn't relatable to me. The main problem I had was with the ending, how it just sort of dropped off, but on reflection that problem is rooted in how the narration throughout moves in and out of two spaces: one of personal memory and intimate reflection (although unplumbed); and the other a space of grander themes like ruination, impermanence, and environmental degradation. Moving back and forth in this way, but not going deeply interrogative in either the intimate or the epic, left the reader without much on which to base character empathy, and without enough texture to which philosophical thought might adhere. If either of these had been deeply investigated, the ending may have had a different feel, but with both of them left not fully examined, there was no choice but to let them collapse on each other.
I would still recommend this book for the visual elements and for the purpose of discussion, but it didn't move me in the way I expected at times it might.
It held such promise: the illustrations were appealing, and I was responsive to the mental space of the main character even though her mobility without reference to any socioeconomic friction wasn't relatable to me. The main problem I had was with the ending, how it just sort of dropped off, but on reflection that problem is rooted in how the narration throughout moves in and out of two spaces: one of personal memory and intimate reflection (although unplumbed); and the other a space of grander themes like ruination, impermanence, and environmental degradation. Moving back and forth in this way, but not going deeply interrogative in either the intimate or the epic, left the reader without much on which to base character empathy, and without enough texture to which philosophical thought might adhere. If either of these had been deeply investigated, the ending may have had a different feel, but with both of them left not fully examined, there was no choice but to let them collapse on each other.
I would still recommend this book for the visual elements and for the purpose of discussion, but it didn't move me in the way I expected at times it might.
May 19, 2017
Edit/update: my interview with Kristen for Electric Literature:
https://electricliterature.com/a-grap...
Sundered by the sudden passing of a cherished uncle — his death the result of an inscrutable and genetically inherited heart defect — Radtke develops an acute awareness of impermanence twinned with an interest in the ways in which abstractions like decay, rot, and ruin are made actual in deserted cities and abandoned mining towns. Imagine Wanting Only This adumbrates Radtke’s literal expeditions — from the once thriving and now eerily deteriorating Gary, Indiana to the kinder side of a village in Iceland, the other side of which remains buried by volcanic ash — while concurrently allowing the reader to witness the crossings and passages and navigations Radtke herself is making in her pilgrimage toward a place where she might reach an understanding of what is and is not reconstitutable in one short life. Kristen Radtke is a thrilling cartographer of curiosity, grief, and grace, and Imagine Wanting Only This announces, like a siren in a sleeping city, the arrival of an unforgettable, undeniable talent.
https://electricliterature.com/a-grap...
Sundered by the sudden passing of a cherished uncle — his death the result of an inscrutable and genetically inherited heart defect — Radtke develops an acute awareness of impermanence twinned with an interest in the ways in which abstractions like decay, rot, and ruin are made actual in deserted cities and abandoned mining towns. Imagine Wanting Only This adumbrates Radtke’s literal expeditions — from the once thriving and now eerily deteriorating Gary, Indiana to the kinder side of a village in Iceland, the other side of which remains buried by volcanic ash — while concurrently allowing the reader to witness the crossings and passages and navigations Radtke herself is making in her pilgrimage toward a place where she might reach an understanding of what is and is not reconstitutable in one short life. Kristen Radtke is a thrilling cartographer of curiosity, grief, and grace, and Imagine Wanting Only This announces, like a siren in a sleeping city, the arrival of an unforgettable, undeniable talent.
Read
June 28, 2021By the time I was 29, I'd been in a long-term toxic relationship for about 6 years. I say that the relationship was toxic and not the person I was in it with, because the truth was that it was just increasingly a bad fit for all involved. I don't know that person anymore, so I don't feel qualified to tell you if they're toxic through and through. I only knew them in the time I knew them. It's myself I've been stuck with since.
When I was 29, things were pretty bad, and I had gotten so used to how bad it was that I mostly ignored it. She didn't. A month before I turned 30, she applied to a job in Guam, and left me alone in Brooklyn. My life was a wreckage, but I wouldn't say now that the wreckage was completely undeserved.
I have a theme of seeing myself as the villain in my own life -- of understanding myself as the Other. When I watch a Disney cartoon where the witch/monster/evil lion is vanquished and they run off into the forest behind a wall of flame with their metaphorical/literal tail between their legs, I'm saying, "but what about their story? What do they do next?" I don't see myself standing on the mountain while the villagers cheer me on. I'm in the dark, running through the forest. Wondering where I have left to go.
My wife and I have a shorthand when we're watching TV and see characters who come in for one scene in order to deliver exposition or incite the protagonists to action. We call them NPCs. When we're driving around town and see someone walking down the street, we call them NPCs too.
I recently started reading Imogen Binnie's Nevada, and found myself very literally described as an angry coworker that the protagonist intentionally provokes into rages out of boredom, and because it is easy, in the bookstore where Imogen and I used to work, where she would intentionally provoke me into rages out of boredom, and because it was easy. I read her description of the same scenes I'd lived through, and remembered the feelings I'd felt and how I often couldn't think straight for the rest of the day after they happened. For me, our fights were very painful and very real. In the book, I am on pages 38 and 39. I am the NPC.
In Imagine Wanting Only This, Radtke chronicles the major themes of her life between undergrad and grad school, and into the beginning of her career. That's the absolute loosest structure I can offer, but let me be clear that school/job stuff is only the framework -- on the actual page, this takes up three or four panels, tops. What the book is really about is her obsessions during these years. The first obsession we're introduced to is her health: Radtke's family suffers from a congenital heart defect that, as a doctor suggests, causes "the heart to beat itself to mush," and the threat of mortality hangs heavy over much of the book.
The second obsession is travel. In the first chapter, Radtke is in a long-term relationship with her undergrad college boyfriend, and after their living situation turns into a toxic hellhole, she applies for a nannying job in Italy on a whim, and blips the fuck out. They try the long-distance thing, but Radtke's restlessness takes precedent. She moves back to the US, goes to grad school, identifies the men she sleeps with by the cigarettes they smoke, and otherwise romantic relationships fall to the periphery of her life.
The third obsession is ruin(s) -- both singular and collective. Both abroad and at home (she travels several more times throughout the book), Radtke is drawn to ruined towns and settlements. The connection between destroyed places and mushed hearts clangs as a consistent theme. The latter half of the book becomes an extended history lesson in ruined places, from rotting mining communities to the temporary towns built by the military during WWII in order to test the effects of napalm.
Radtke's ultimate thesis reveals itself in the book's final pages: "The floors will rot, the carpet will be torn out, the cement will crack and shift and be pulled from the earth, the dirt will be tilled and changed and rained away, and someday there will be nothing left that you have touched," she says. "You will have touched nothing on the earth."
It was hard for me to not see myself in relief when reading Imagine Wanting Only This. I am the boyfriend left in the hellhole bedroom, the friend who sees how easy it was for her to get a job abroad and writes letters full of thinly-veiled jealousy. I am pausing on the acknowledgements page, seeing that the grad school program Radtke describes fleetingly happens to be the most prestigious program in the country. I am trying to publish work on pop-up indie presses while Radtke is published by Pantheon, an imprint that's been around since the 1940s. I find myself wondering if my life and creative output would be more significant if I was driven by the concrete threat of mortality rather than existential anxiety and formless, creeping dread. I think about the moments in which I have gradually begun to accept my own invisibility -- that my existence is a figment, that if I am to have a legacy, it will mostly likely be as someone else's NPC. If I am real at all, it is only in the moments I can find it within me to work hard enough to see myself.
I find it difficult to imagine time the way Radtke does, and to be obsessed with it the way she is. Her central concern -- the obsession tying all the others together -- is permanence, or the lack thereof. When we have died and the earth forgets us we will cease to exist, and this eventuality both terrifies and fascinates her.
The concern that we will cease to exist implies that we existed in the first place. By the macrocosmic parameters that Imagine Wanting Only This uses to define existence, I am not sure that I do.
When I was 29, things were pretty bad, and I had gotten so used to how bad it was that I mostly ignored it. She didn't. A month before I turned 30, she applied to a job in Guam, and left me alone in Brooklyn. My life was a wreckage, but I wouldn't say now that the wreckage was completely undeserved.
I have a theme of seeing myself as the villain in my own life -- of understanding myself as the Other. When I watch a Disney cartoon where the witch/monster/evil lion is vanquished and they run off into the forest behind a wall of flame with their metaphorical/literal tail between their legs, I'm saying, "but what about their story? What do they do next?" I don't see myself standing on the mountain while the villagers cheer me on. I'm in the dark, running through the forest. Wondering where I have left to go.
My wife and I have a shorthand when we're watching TV and see characters who come in for one scene in order to deliver exposition or incite the protagonists to action. We call them NPCs. When we're driving around town and see someone walking down the street, we call them NPCs too.
I recently started reading Imogen Binnie's Nevada, and found myself very literally described as an angry coworker that the protagonist intentionally provokes into rages out of boredom, and because it is easy, in the bookstore where Imogen and I used to work, where she would intentionally provoke me into rages out of boredom, and because it was easy. I read her description of the same scenes I'd lived through, and remembered the feelings I'd felt and how I often couldn't think straight for the rest of the day after they happened. For me, our fights were very painful and very real. In the book, I am on pages 38 and 39. I am the NPC.
In Imagine Wanting Only This, Radtke chronicles the major themes of her life between undergrad and grad school, and into the beginning of her career. That's the absolute loosest structure I can offer, but let me be clear that school/job stuff is only the framework -- on the actual page, this takes up three or four panels, tops. What the book is really about is her obsessions during these years. The first obsession we're introduced to is her health: Radtke's family suffers from a congenital heart defect that, as a doctor suggests, causes "the heart to beat itself to mush," and the threat of mortality hangs heavy over much of the book.
The second obsession is travel. In the first chapter, Radtke is in a long-term relationship with her undergrad college boyfriend, and after their living situation turns into a toxic hellhole, she applies for a nannying job in Italy on a whim, and blips the fuck out. They try the long-distance thing, but Radtke's restlessness takes precedent. She moves back to the US, goes to grad school, identifies the men she sleeps with by the cigarettes they smoke, and otherwise romantic relationships fall to the periphery of her life.
The third obsession is ruin(s) -- both singular and collective. Both abroad and at home (she travels several more times throughout the book), Radtke is drawn to ruined towns and settlements. The connection between destroyed places and mushed hearts clangs as a consistent theme. The latter half of the book becomes an extended history lesson in ruined places, from rotting mining communities to the temporary towns built by the military during WWII in order to test the effects of napalm.
Radtke's ultimate thesis reveals itself in the book's final pages: "The floors will rot, the carpet will be torn out, the cement will crack and shift and be pulled from the earth, the dirt will be tilled and changed and rained away, and someday there will be nothing left that you have touched," she says. "You will have touched nothing on the earth."
It was hard for me to not see myself in relief when reading Imagine Wanting Only This. I am the boyfriend left in the hellhole bedroom, the friend who sees how easy it was for her to get a job abroad and writes letters full of thinly-veiled jealousy. I am pausing on the acknowledgements page, seeing that the grad school program Radtke describes fleetingly happens to be the most prestigious program in the country. I am trying to publish work on pop-up indie presses while Radtke is published by Pantheon, an imprint that's been around since the 1940s. I find myself wondering if my life and creative output would be more significant if I was driven by the concrete threat of mortality rather than existential anxiety and formless, creeping dread. I think about the moments in which I have gradually begun to accept my own invisibility -- that my existence is a figment, that if I am to have a legacy, it will mostly likely be as someone else's NPC. If I am real at all, it is only in the moments I can find it within me to work hard enough to see myself.
I find it difficult to imagine time the way Radtke does, and to be obsessed with it the way she is. Her central concern -- the obsession tying all the others together -- is permanence, or the lack thereof. When we have died and the earth forgets us we will cease to exist, and this eventuality both terrifies and fascinates her.
The concern that we will cease to exist implies that we existed in the first place. By the macrocosmic parameters that Imagine Wanting Only This uses to define existence, I am not sure that I do.
Read
January 29, 2018It's really pretty and thoughtful relating to grief and death and loss and impermanence. I love the way Radtke connects feeling disconnected from place to feeling that sort of great loss and working through it.
But the Seth plot line. . . felt weirdly extraneous and uncomfortable. I get what was going on with it, and I appreciated how it gives us a glimpse into what sort of mindset Radtke worked through in her early 20s, but it almost feels as though the book would have been stronger without it. That, or it needed more reflection and extraction.
A quick read and worthwhile, but uneven and at times, a stretch (which, fairly, she explains away a bit as her grasping to understand everything and pretending even when she doesn't).
But the Seth plot line. . . felt weirdly extraneous and uncomfortable. I get what was going on with it, and I appreciated how it gives us a glimpse into what sort of mindset Radtke worked through in her early 20s, but it almost feels as though the book would have been stronger without it. That, or it needed more reflection and extraction.
A quick read and worthwhile, but uneven and at times, a stretch (which, fairly, she explains away a bit as her grasping to understand everything and pretending even when she doesn't).
January 1, 2018
My last finished book of 2017 (which makes 201 books)!
This is a moving and thought provoking graphic memoir about a young woman’s meditation on permanence and memory. What determines how a place is remembered as it decays into picturesque ruins or a rotted blight? What are we, as impermanent residents of this earth, supposed to leave behind? Radtke’s journey in this book through ruins both physical and metaphorical is riveting.
This is a moving and thought provoking graphic memoir about a young woman’s meditation on permanence and memory. What determines how a place is remembered as it decays into picturesque ruins or a rotted blight? What are we, as impermanent residents of this earth, supposed to leave behind? Radtke’s journey in this book through ruins both physical and metaphorical is riveting.
September 1, 2021
It's one thing for a young person to live a somewhat aimless life. Many young people do that.
And it's one thing for a young person to do a lot of navel gazing. Many young people do that also.
But it takes a lot of narcissism to write a book about those subjects and expect others to read it.
After reading this, I removed Ms. Radtke's Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness from my To Read shelf. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And that ain't gonna happen.
And it's one thing for a young person to do a lot of navel gazing. Many young people do that also.
But it takes a lot of narcissism to write a book about those subjects and expect others to read it.
After reading this, I removed Ms. Radtke's Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness from my To Read shelf. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And that ain't gonna happen.
April 11, 2022
I found this book a bit challenging. There were chapters and passages I found very beautifully written and moving, but other parts that wandered and didn't fully connect back into the major narrative. Radtke opens with the death of a beloved uncle from a genetic heart condition, one that she likely also carries. Around this same time she made her first visit to an abandoned, ruined town. A certain melancholic and morbid fascination continued to draw her, over and over, to decayed places where human civilization seems to have collapsed altogether. At one of these sites she finds many photographs in plastic bags which she collects and brings home, thinking she might make some kind of found art project from them. She later learns that these were part of the memorial for a young photographer who passed away and that she has accidentally stolen his shrine. The second half of the book includes the collapse of her engagement and a lonely wander into and out of grad school as the author tries to figure out what to do with her life. How can she find meaning in a life so marked by impermanence?
July 27, 2017
(If you are a huge graphic novels fan, you may want to disregard this entire review.)
I'm not, as a rule, crazy about graphic novels. They tend, in my view, to be beautifully illustrated, yes, but text-wise quite disappointing.
This graphic novel is different. The text is rich, and thoughtful, and brilliant, and the illustrations are wonderful, too.
The story is a meditation on Radtke's own life, and it centers on her experiences with a site where a fellow who was obsessed with decay found his own demise. It's about death and ruin and destruction and degeneration, and it is very wise. Depressing, too, but very true.
I'm not, as a rule, crazy about graphic novels. They tend, in my view, to be beautifully illustrated, yes, but text-wise quite disappointing.
This graphic novel is different. The text is rich, and thoughtful, and brilliant, and the illustrations are wonderful, too.
The story is a meditation on Radtke's own life, and it centers on her experiences with a site where a fellow who was obsessed with decay found his own demise. It's about death and ruin and destruction and degeneration, and it is very wise. Depressing, too, but very true.
November 1, 2024
I came across this by accident at my local (Hamburg, Germany) library. I thought it was a bit pretentious but fine, until I read the first review here, from Seth's mom... Wow. There's a lot to unpack here. I'm disappointed that I wasted my time on this.
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