5 Questions with Lee Lai
Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist currently living in Tio’tia:ke (known as Montreal, Quebec).
She has been featured in The New Yorker, McSweeneys, Room magazine, and Meanjin. Her first graphic novel Stone Fruit will be released by Fantagraphics on May 11, and has been translated into nine languages.
No.1
Lee! I’m so happy that the eagerly-awaited Stone Fruit is almost out. You’ve been making comics for a long time; when did you begin to think about writing a full-length graphic novel?
Thanks Leah! It’s both very nice and very daunting to have it be released. I did a lot of cognitive-dissonance-style exercises as I was making the book to ignore the idea of friends and strangers actually reading the thing and formulating their opinions and reactions– but I guess that’s something I’m going to have to face now!
I’ve wanted to make long-form comics for years, but I think I was waiting to feel like my skills and my patience could even begin to cope with a project this long. On the aesthetic side of things, it’s a lot of consistency of drawing, a lot of poses and backgrounds to learn, a lot of things I’ve never drawn before (escalators! The interior of a car! Old white ladies! The list goes on). The learning curve was so steep that I found myself redrawing panels or whole pages pretty regularly. On the writing side, I had to work solely on the script for the first of the three years this book needed, so I could allow myself the stumbling around and constant re-drafting that was necessary as I wrangled with getting to know multiple characters, circling around narrative dead-ends, and shuffling story beats.
Desiree Akhavan, an independent filmmaker I admire a lot, said that a solid piece of advice she’d give to emerging artists is to learn to tolerate your own mediocrity (in order to actually finish things and grow). I kept this idea very much to heart as I was working on this project– without that, I probably wouldn’t have managed to finish.
No.2
Can you tell us a little bit about the physical process of creating the work?
My process has been pretty traditional and unchanged for the past few years, which has made it possible to get more intimately acquainted with my materials. I use a smooth Bristol board (a hot press heavyweight paper that a lot of cartoonists seem to use) which has a very fine tooth and allows for ‘cleaner’ drawing. I tend to pencil out whole scenes at a time, anywhere between three to fifteen pages, and then paint the backgrounds in with gouache before inking the figures with black ink and a fine sable brush. Everything gets scanned in at this point and I do some basic colour-balancing and correcting bad lines on Photoshop, but I try to leave it looking a little messy where I can bear it.
No.3
Stone Fruit is such a fully realised vision. How did you come to this idea, and where did your research lie?
The beginning of this writing process came from wanting to build a couple of characters that would allow me to chew on my feelings about parenting. I spent the earlier part of my twenties pendulum-swinging between wanting kids and not wanting kids, and in that period of time I started writing comic vignettes of a queer woman around my age, hanging out with a young kid who is in her care. I tried to write scenes with play and fun that also made room for the presence of depression and anger.
I also wanted to muddle through conversations on how biology affects family definitions—in the story, Ray is Nessie’s (the six-year-old’s) auntie, while her semi-estranged sister is the biological mother. In turn, Bron (Ray’s girlfriend) has no bio-ties to Nessie, but is still very much the beloved Auntie Bron in Nessie’s eyes. I wanted the characters’ experiences to somehow express my own incomplete thoughts on how delicate a tension these differences create, and the incomparable ways in which each character experiences power, insecurity, jealousy, and then also joy with Nessie.
The artists that have influenced me are pretty countless. In the comics-realm, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s collaborative work has always hit me very hard, and closer to home, Tommi Parrish has been a close friend and a regular inspiration for the past decade– we were lucky to be working on our first books in a shared studio. Outside of comics, Celeste Ng’s fiction drastically affected how I learned to character-build. Plus the countless YA fantasy audiobooks I’ve devoured over the years: other than keeping me entertained through the thousands of hours drawing, they’ve schooled me pretty damn well on how to pace a story. Most recently, Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha series really moved me.
No. 4
What is one thing you’d like readers to take away from Stone Fruit?
Anything they want! It’s just wild to think people are going to read it! I really hope that the book is welcome reading for QTBIPOC, even if it's got a decent share of heartbreak and hard feelings in it. I hope it’s a fair and loving drop in the ever-growing pool of stories about trans folks.
No.5
What is next on the horizon?
Next up for me is a book dealing with yet more cheerful subject matters—I’m working on a story called Cannon that’s about two friends who are figuring out whether they’ve reached the end of the road in their friendship (or not). It’s an opportunity for me to scrabble around with my own questions about whether anger is inherited, and what the hell to do with it, if it is.
Circling back to something I mentioned above, I’ve found (via many conversations about this with Tommi) that if I see projects as one large training exercise to enable the next project, it’s easier to look at all the flaws with not only doom and disappointment. Writing Stone Fruit was a challenge, but it certainly unlocked the satisfaction of long-form writing for me, so I imagine i’ll be spending as much time as I can doing that now.
comic Excerpts from Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit, out May 11.
Find out more
Find Lee on Instagram @_leelai, or read ‘Nice Young Man’, Lee’s comic for our Comic Sans series.
Stone Fruit is an exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore. Find it at Fantagraphics or your local bookshop.