This East Bay Graphic Novel Celebrates the Magic of Passing Notes With Friends

The epigraph for Briana Loewinsohn’s wonderfully nostalgic new graphic memoir Raised by Ghosts reads, “This is not a love story. It is a love letter.” Set during the author’s middle and high school years in Berkeley, Oakland and El Cerrito in the 1990s, the book is a coming-of-age story about the deep loneliness of being a teenager, and also the transformative power of friendship and art.

It’s also, as much as anything, about the magic of handwritten letters and notes.

Reached by phone, the Oakland cartoonist explains that this was actually the impetus for the whole book: “First and foremost I wanted to write about notes,” she says.

Over the course of the graphic novel’s 200 pages, Loewinsohn’s adolescent self is constantly writing notes to her friends. She folds them up into little triangles and passes them when the teacher isn’t looking, and marvels at how good and funny and weird a certain friend’s notes always are.

The book also features what has become one of Loewinsohn’s signature devices (debuted in her KQED series on old East Bay coffee shops and movie theaters), wherein she includes a handwritten note — something like a diary entry — every few pages, between scenes. Like her debut memoir, Ephemera, about her early childhood, Raised by Ghosts has a quiet beauty, and many of the panels have little to no dialogue whatsoever. Against that backdrop, the handwritten interludes give deeper insight into what she’s thinking.

“[The other kids] all seem to understand how to be in the world in a way that I do not,” she writes in one note. “They punch each other and laugh. Then they punch someone else. They get it.” In another, about her dad: “He will never ask how my day was or how school is going. But he will also never bother me. … Some days, though, I wouldn’t mind being bothered.”

Loewinsohn says she’s kept every single note that her friends ever gave her. As research for the book, she went back and reread all of them — along with her high school journal and every email she wrote in 1997 — to put herself back into that “cringeworthy” mode of teenage self-expression.

Now, Loewinsohn thinks back on all the notes she exchanged with her friends as an early form of social media.

“It was a cure for boredom, definitely, and a conduit for gossip,” she says. “But I think it really just made you feel connected to people even when you maybe weren’t with them, because you were like, ‘Oh, I’m writing a note to this person, or I’m waiting to get a note.’ There was that serotonin bump when you would get a note.”

As Loewinsohn’s teenage self explains in one of the handwritten notes that are interspersed throughout the book, “Notes make us feel … like we have a friend with us when really we are surrounded by zombies. … I can’t imagine how lonely I’d feel without them.”

Raised by Ghosts will resonate with Gen Xers and elder millennials who went to high school in the ’90s, watched the same movies and TV shows, and made mixtapes with the same bands (Tupac, Green Day, The Smashing Pumpkins). Readers who grew up in the East Bay, in particular, will get a heavy dose of nostalgia from Loewinsohn’s lovingly rendered drawings of the old haunts where she and her friends spent their nights and weekends: Moe’s Books, Amoeba Music, Albany Bowl, all ages shows at Berkeley Square.

But the book was really written with a teenage audience in mind, says Loewinsohn. On the one hand, she thinks many pages in Raised by Ghosts will read as fun objects of curiosity for teens today, who might not talk on the phone at all anymore or at least not in the same way we Olds did — for six hours sometimes, twisting the long cord around our fingers, until our parents kicked us off the line or we literally fell asleep. They may have never known what it was like to fold up a handwritten note during a time when social media didn’t exist in the same way. (One of the most fun outcomes of the book, Loewinsohn says, would be if it helps spark a resurgence in note-writing among teens — which is why she included detailed origami diagrams for three different note-folding techniques in the appendix.)

Even more than that, though, Loewinsohn hopes young readers will take the book’s message to heart. “The intention of the book is really just to acknowledge how hard it is to be a teenager and how big the feelings are — whether they’re founded or unfounded is inconsequential. It is hard to be a teenager,” she says. “And the book is to acknowledge that and to tell you, I see you. You’re doing great. Keep going, and look for things in your life that help you feel connected.”

It’s fitting, then, that one of Loewinsohn’s very first events promoting Raised by Ghosts will be geared specifically for a teen audience. Her Feb. 22 reading at the Oakland Public Library will feature a Q&A led by fellow Oakland graphic novelist (and frequent KQED contributor) Thien Pham, and Loewinsohn will also spend some time talking about how she got into drawing comics to begin with.

When asked about the challenges of catering a book event for a younger crowd, Loewinsohn noted that she talks to teenagers every day. She’s worked as a high school art teacher for the past 20 years, after all.

Raised by Ghosts is available at all booksellers now. The Oakland Public Library event will take place on Saturday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m., in the TeenZone at the main branch (125 14th St., Oakland). Follow Loewinsohn on Instagram for details on other upcoming events.