You'll Never Know

About this book

In the wake of Alison Bechdels Fun Home and Art Spiegelmans Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tylers multigenerational graphic memoir Youll Never Know. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father Charles a WWII veteran and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. Youll Never Know is also a tribute to servicemen and women dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tylers ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her fathers memories are woven into her own which span her Catholic Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughters struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tylers work has an accessible homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with snapshots of Tyler family life) Youll Never Know is a sophisticated graphic work about war love and loss.