Liana Finck, Cartoonist/Philosopher/Genius
HOW TO BABY, Liana Finck's hilarious, no-advice book, provides a profound message about the ravages of parental inequality.
I had already been a years-long fan of New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck’s brilliant work and one of her ardent 581,000 followers on Instagram by the time The Atlantic, unbeknownst to me, assigned her to illustrate one of my essays. I screamed when I saw it: “Oh my god!” I said out loud. To no one. (I’d just discovered my ex-partner’s betrayals, the pain from which the dark humor in Finck’s cartoons had been saving me daily.)
We all have secret celebrity crushes. Liana, whom I’d never met, was mine. Each of her cartoons spoke to me or made me laugh or made me think about the absurdities of being alive, trying to love, and yearning to thrive while being thwarted not only by the chaos and cruelty of others but also (and often) by the quirks and self-sabotaging of our own flawed selves. She felt like my shadow soul, unafraid not only to say the quiet parts out loud but also to draw them so simply, so succinctly, so seemingly effortlessly that a single line or word or cartoon could make my complicated feelings about, well, everything—sexism, marriage, friendship, loneliness, you name it, she’s drawn it—feel both less complicated and less serious. If she could laugh at both her own and others’ foibles and turn them into art, surely so could I.
I loved one of the cartoons accompanying my essay so much, in fact—it illustrated, perfectly, the relationship between my mentor and me—that I DM’d Liana on Instagram to see if she would sell me a print of it, never expecting to hear back. With her bazillion followers, I figured, she must get requests from strangers all the time. But I had to try. The cartoon was of two uteri holding hands. It will make sense when you read the essay, but you also don’t have to have read the essay to appreciate the joy and whimsy of her drawing.
Liana not only got back to me almost immediately—in the middle of moving apartments, and days before giving birth to her first baby—but she also took the time to send me the illustration in the mail, gratis. I was shocked by all of this, but I was equally shocked by her young age. Wait, what? She was pregnant? With her first child? How could this woman still be young enough to be having a child? I’d assumed, from the wisdom in her cartoons, that she was older. Much older. Like maybe even older than me. My second thought was this: I can’t wait to see how she turns the absurdities of parenthood into comic gold.
I didn’t have to wait long. Almost immediately, hilarious and profound drawings about the ravages of parenthood—what it does to the body, the mind, a career, a marriage—sprouted from her mind into the ether and onto her Substack, all of which I’d wished I had back in the Pleistocene era, when I had my first kid. The only advice I could find then, back in 1995, had pink covers with cartoon flowers and happy mothers all looking down adoringly at their swelling bellies. They made me feel as if I were doing a shitty job at everything: work, motherhood, marriage. That I could never win. That the game was rigged against me and every person with a uterus.
But what if I’d had this drawing, below, back then, from Finck’s new book How To Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings, which uses the trope of the annoying prescriptive parenting advice book to lampoon the entire idea of prescriptive advice books? That one simple word under the woman’s face, calcify, does so much work next to her neutral expression. It says…everything.
What if I’d had this drawing, below, which defined my ill-fated marriage and its issues, post-parenthood, in a single frame?
I read the book so fast and so furiously, giggling with recognition on every page, that I reached out to Finck once again to see if she would be game for this interview, below.
Yes, I know most of you are long past parenting. That many of you are either in, out, or nearing menopause. That this is often how you found me and/or this publication. I know that some of you are even onto grandparenting. But I also think that reading this book is useful to anyone, male or female, at any age or any stage in parenting. (If you are happily child-free, you might pick one up and give yourself a little pat on the back after finishing it, just saying.)
Finck has been cartooning since she was a child, and her expertise with both a pen and succinct word choice shows. At the same time, part of her genius is in still being able to see the world with childlike awe, through a child’s eyes, but with a mature brain and vulnerable heart that know, really know, how absurd life can be. Not to get too hyperbolic about a book of cartoons lampooning a parenting advice book, but reading How To Baby felt like reading one of those rare works of philosophy that open your eyes to a totally new way of seeing, only without the big words and long sentences.
“This!” I told my soon-to-be-married daughter, handing her Finck’s book. “This is the only parenting book you’ll ever need. Trust me.” And though the book has a mother on its cover, I plan on buying extra copies for both my sons and stepsons as well if and when they decide to start families. Maybe I’ll even buy one for my ex-husband, to explain to him, with humor, what it felt like for me to parent our kids, mostly alone, while working, a role which I’ve held now for 29 years, with my last baby flying the coop this fall. It’s been a wild ride, one I would never give up for anything, but it has not been without its systemic prejudices, complications, frustrations, and wounds, as Liana’s book so hilariously illustrates.
My mentor Nora, the one Liana drew in the shape of a uterus, handed me a mirrored frame as a gift a couple of months before she died of leukemia. “No reason,” she said. “I saw it and I thought you’d like it.” She knew she was dying. I did not. No one did. And I think she must have been trying to leave tiny pieces of herself with her mentees, of which I was just one of many. “Put something black and white in it,” she said. “Not color. Color will look bad.” She had strong opinions on every topic, not just frames and what goes in them. And she, like Liana, made a career of speaking the quiet part out loud. She also knew “how to baby.” Even when those babies weren’t her own. Which is the real message of Finck’s book: yes, parenting kids is hard, but even though it’s hard, and even though our patriarchal world doesn’t make it any easier, raising a child is the valuable work of love.
As a tribute to both women, I’ve put Liana’s black and white print in the frame Nora gave me. It sits on a shelf, directly in front of my bed, next to a photo of my mother leaning over me as a baby, and every morning I give thanks to all three women—Mom, Nora, and Liana—for knowing “how to baby.”
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1. I’m a fan of anyone who’s a fan of Ms. Ephron or Ms. Finck, and a big fan of anyone who’s a fan of both.
2. I (a cis man) also couldn’t stop reading How To Baby!
Awww, Deb. I loved this essay. Thanks for introducing me to Liana!