Virtual Memories Show 663:
Jennifer Hayden
“The great crystallizing aspect of aging is that the older you get, the more intense you get about what you really are, and the less you give a shit about all that stuff you’re not.”
Who knew that olive oil makes head lice sleepy? Jennifer Hayden rejoins the show to celebrate her new graphic memoir/anti-cookbook, WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S DINNER: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (Top Shelf), share comedic tales of domestic mess, and rebel against the expectations of wife/motherhood. We talk about the lifetime of bad cooking that led to this new book, the revenge of turning her bad experiences into comedy, how she found a unique form to tell her story, and how a youthful reading of Babar left her with a lifelong phobia of mushrooms. We get into how she was reverse-inspired by Lucy Knisley’s Relish, how watercolors gave her a color toolbox for her comics, what this book taught her about storytelling, and how her daughter diagnosed her as “expectation-allergic.” We also discuss how she’s been cheating on comics with spoken word storytelling, what life after memoir is like, how her breast-cancer memoir doubled as a last will & testament for her family, the process of finding a new creative process and narrative voice, her shamanic experience attending The Moth, the significance of the tarot card she repeatedly draws when she’s hard at work on a book, why the folk names of herbs are like edible emotion, and more. Give it a listen! And go read WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S DINNER!
“My great fear as a mother is that I would poison my children. But wasn’t going to poison them with frozen food, or McDonalds, or takeout; I had to try to poison them on my own.”
“The reason I’m not doing a comic or graphic novel right now — and I have got a couple of story ideas — is because I need to change who I am in comics. I’m becoming someone other than my avatar. I don’t identify with quite as much negativity or ruefulness as I did.”
“As a kid I just kept my head down and tried to make sure nobody expected anything more of me, because I was definitely going to disappoint them.”
“I’m basically the Florence Nightingale of graphic memoir.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Jennifer Hayden is the author and artist of the Eisner-nominated breast cancer memoir The Story of My Tits, which has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and French. The French edition, Nénés Chéris, was short-listed for Elle France’s 2022 comics grand prize. Her first collection, Underwire, was published in The Best American Comics 2013. She draws and cooks dinner in the woods of New Jersey and plans to use the proceeds of this book to hire a personal chef.
Follow Jennifer on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to her Substack.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Jennifer’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Jennifer by me. It’s on my instagram.
