Pretending Is Lying

Series: New York Review Comics
ISBN: 9781681370477
Pages: 160
Publication Date: February 7, 2017

It is a rare gift to come across a book as tender, affecting and complete as Pretending is Lying.
—Sheila Heti, The New York Times Book Review

This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography.
—Publishers Weekly

Here’s a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet’s approach is postmodern, with a scruffy, anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it’s marked everywhere by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale—an autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and brutality—with images that look like photos.
—Etelka Lehoczky, NPR’s Book Concierge, “2017′s Great Reads”

Primarily pencil-sketched, Goblet’s art is unbridled and alternately busy and peaceful. She uses lettering to great effect, too, expressing mood, feeling, and, in her father’s case, drunkenness with the appearance of the text. Some pages feature only vague, dimly lit shapes, as if there are ghosts hovering on the periphery of Goblet’s relationships, her memoir’s primary subject. This is an imaginative, nonlinear rendering of an artist’s life so far.
—Booklist

A touchstone work of comics autobiography, from one of the genre’s key innovators, is finally translated, complete with expressive lettering newly handcrafted by the artist.
—Sean Rogers, The Globe and Mail

Pretending Is Lying is a perceptive and poignant contribution to the fields of both experimental comics and graphic autobiography, and well worth the read.
—Hans Rollman, Pop Matters

Combining paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil, Goblet’s mixed-media pages feel wet, textured, bleeding. . . . [Pretending is Lying is] part of a rich tradition of international graphic memoirs from Art Spiegelman’s Maus to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. . . . We’re invited to peer into the artist’s mind. . . . It is a privilege to serve as [her] confidante, if only for a while.
—Chantal McStay, BOMB

Dominique Goblet spent twelve years putting parts of her life to rest—explicit snippets and fragments that condense her entire childhood and sketch a tender portrait of the adult she is today. . . . Goblet hides nothing. And she forgives, weaving together, in gray and black and on yellowing paper, with strokes of her brush, a shocking kind of autobiography.
—L’Express