New Adventures In Old New York

Once upon a time (April 1991), famously chronicled in My New York Diary, Julie Doucet came to live in New York. Having left behind her staid Montreal life, Doucet settled into her boyfriend’s apartment in Washington Heights, all the while dreaming of the East Village. In New York, she continued to work on Dirty Plotte, the comic that was just beginning to make her name, drank countless beers, consumed copious drugs—she even drew a New York Press cover!—and began to feel increasingly trapped in her relationship. Her epilepsy worsened, seizure coming fast upon seizure, propelled by a mixture of late nights, alcohol and acid. Her boyfriend became jealous of her success as his own career stalled. And all the while, Julie meticulously documented her life in insistent strokes of black and white. By the end of Diary, Julie has broken up with her boyfriend, prepares to leave New York for good and vows to never again live in Montreal.

Almost 20 years later, Julie is living in Montreal. She continues to work in comics, though these have gotten steadily less confessional, less bleedon-the-page, more self-protective, more concealed. One day, while “doing silk screen printing” (helpfully labeled on the second page of My New New York Diary), she receives an email from director Michel Gondry, who proposes a collaboration: He wants to make a film using Doucet’s still drawings, with the main character—Julie herself—eventually coming to life. Doucet’s first reaction is panic. “NO NO NO NO NO NO,” she thinks, but eventually, too intrigued to keep protesting, she agrees. First, she buys a tape recorder. Next, she starts making drawings. Finally, she boards a bus and heads back to New York.

Doucet’s drawings, less comics than full-page illustrations, chronicle her arrival (late, after a bus overbooking and a traffic jam in Jersey), her stay with Gondry at his East Williamsburg house (“i expected Michel’s house to be a big hollywood film director’s house. but, no”), work on the project and a strip club sojourn (“the plan was to draw the girls dancing”). “it had been a fun trip,”

Doucet remarks on the book’s last page, though we are mostly asked to take her word for it. There is, finally, little here by way of energy, of intimacy. Perhaps the best illustration of this lack comes when

Julie visits her old Washington Heights building and cannot remember which apartment had been hers; removed from the immediacy of experience, she has only a vague memory of her environment, though she remarks that little has changed in the neighborhood. Similarly, her drawings in this new work have not remarkably departed from those in My New York Diary, but the reader is hardpressed to locate herself, to connect to this Julie, who shares too little to foster a truly meaningful connection.

Or perhaps an even clearer sense of the problem is supplied by Gondry, in his voice-over to the companion film— which, true to the book’s explanation of the planned collaboration, proceeds, mostly, to insert Doucet’s filmed image into the drawings collected in the book (she looks, if you are wondering, charmingly uncomfortable and simultaneously like and unlike her drawn depiction)—when he describes his archetype of the female comic book artist as “shy and egomaniac, discreet and self-absorbed at once.” This may well be true of the Julie of My New York Diary, the 20-years-gone Julie who doubts herself even as she scorches the page with indelibly inked experience. This present-day Julie is still shy, yes, but her discretion has thoroughly consumed the ego, the absorption. This might make for a happier woman, a better adjusted person, but it makes for an artist who is too sedate to tell us anything really new.