Lynda Barry wrote 'Cruddy' with a brush

Lynda Barry spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia tonight about her book What It Is. I can’t imagine a better way that I could have spent my later evening. Barry is one of the most charming and unpretentious writers I have ever listened to. She makes a point of it. And, I sort of had a feeling that she would come off as nice as can be. That’s why it’s a little crazy to think that she wrote Cruddy, a book I read in 2002, but I’ve often heard that the most twisted creators are the nicest people.

In fact, I’ve had a suspicion for a while that writers are always the opposite of their art. It’s probably wrong, but when the time came to ask questions, that’s what I asked her about. How is it such a nice woman with a hippy background wrote such a disturbing book about a little girl who kills people?

She smiled with a bit of relish.

She explained that she struggled over Cruddy for years. She worried it much too much, and she wrote What It Is to help people get over those sorts of worries. She finally broke herself out of her writer’s block by using a new medium for writing.

It turns out that she really took the medium switching strategy to an extreme. She wrote the whole book with a brush, to slow herself down as much as possible. She was writing these huge letters, dipping in ink, going slowly. She said that if it hadn’t written in that way, so slowly, so intentionally, she never would have learned that what she really wanted to write about was killing and murder and violence.

Pow. That’s something you remember.

Barry was really something to see. She opened with an autobiographical parody of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and closed by singing “You are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed. In between, she made us laugh a dozen times and wonder a dozen times more. The audience loved her, and that’s probably in part because you can feel her love you back.

When she closed, the M.C. had to get up on stage and apologize. He said that, for the first time ever, the bookseller had completely sold out of every copy of her new book that he’d brought, even before the talk began.