One! Hundred! Demons!

“She was at the library when she first read about a painting exercise called, ‘one hundred demons’!”

Barry explains the central conceit of the book, the Zen meditative exercise that prompts each chapter’s visual essay about a different “demon”—or a person, idea, or experience that haunts Barry or challenges some aspect of her life and growth. By flipping the narrator into the third person (Barry refers to herself as “she”), Barry constructs herself as a separate entity, mimicking the way she will analyze the different versions of herself with reflective distance.

“He seemed interested in my background and nick-named me ‘little ghetto girl.’”

This quote describes Barry’s worst boyfriend and his class-inflected condescension toward her. He both fetishizes her underprivileged upbringing and denigrates it, using a derogatory term and equating her with a child. These kinds of comments create a toxic power dynamic, where the boyfriend feels that Barry should be grateful for his interest in her and constantly uses his upper hand to make her feel insecure.

“The unforgettable becomes forgotten.”

Barry describes the way memories from childhood—even strong, deeply embodied memories—fade as one ages. All the anticipation and excitement about a neighborhood game of kickball that seemed so meaningful at the time does not translate into a sticky memory. This passage also anticipates the way Barry will forcibly repress traumatic memories in later chapters.

“Who knows which moments make us who we are? Some of them? All of them?”

One of the central questions of this book is which experiences shape identity. Barry knows she cannot capture everything that’s ever happened to her, so she will have to choose what to portray in the book. By describing key moments and tracing the way they connect, Barry can as an adult reflect on these links and consider how they manifest in her adult personality.

“The dread and desire were equal.”

After Barry has lost her ability to dance without self-consciousness, this is how she sees her new relationship with bodily movement. The construction of this line, which uses both alliteration (using words that start with the same sound for emphasis) and parallelism (matching grammatical structures—here, two adjectives), highlights the tension between Barry’s lost youth and her emerging adolescence. She has a strong “desire” to participate and dance freely like she used to but the new shame of being perceived as a bad dancer fills her with “dread.”

“Of course the biggest mystery of all was my own house. I couldn’t smell it at all.”

When Barry investigates the smells of her childhood, she remembers that although she is so sensitive to the scents in other houses, she has trouble applying that same olfactory scrutiny to her own house. The undetectable smell symbolizes the challenge of perceiving yourself and your own life with the same distance you can apply to others’ lives.

“I cringe when people talk about the resiliency of children. It’s a hope adults have about the nature of a child’s inner life, that it’s simple, that what can be forgotten can no longer affect us.”

Barry deconstructs a misconception about the nature of childhood and trauma. Throughout the book Barry explores memories that profoundly affected her—experiences that she willed herself to forget and never talked about with any adults. While the parental figures around her perceived this self-repression as a healthy coping mechanism, Barry argues that this is a mistaken idea; she disproves the fiction of “the resiliency of children” by showing the complexity of her childhood inner life and the far-reaching impacts of her trauma.

“I became a teenager when I discovered how to give myself that feeling of wholeness, even if it lasted only for a moment, even if it got me into huge trouble, it was the closest I could come to…to…I don’t remember.”

Barry dramatizes the process of forcing herself to forget and repress her feelings in the wake of disturbing events. It’s clear from the surrounding panels and from her several allusions that Barry does remember what happened. But even as she approaches the memory, she can’t or won’t describe it directly; her maladaptive coping strategy learned in childhood is too deeply internalized.

“She was the first person to explain the difference between the kind of hate that has destructive intent and the kind hat’s a response to something destructive.”

Barry finds refuge in a substitute teacher who clarifies the nature of a hate in a way that more closely matches young Barry’s observations. Rather than hypocritically spouting platitudes about how hate is never okay, this teacher talks frankly about real feelings and where they come from. This ends up being a formative moment for Barry because it is one of the first times she feels validated and understood. This encounter with an adult who isn’t blatantly lying (to Barry and to themself) is salutary.

“Of course, my mom worshipped grandma. She was alert to her every move. I worshipped my mother.”

The parallel construction underscores the cycle of generational power dynamics in Barry’s family. Here, we see unequal levels of affection between mothers and daughters; the daughter worships the mother, the mother rejects and disciplines the daughter—the implication is that this happened to Grandma with her own mother as well. While Grandma can step in to provide some of the warmth that Barry’s mother withholds, she cannot translate this into better treatment for her daughter. It is unclear whether Barry assumes that her mother would also become a warmer, more kindly grandmother.

“One day you just notice something is gone. Possibility is gone. It’s so gone that everyone around you seems like an idiot or a liar.”

Barry describes her teen angst as a kind of void—the loss of the magical and hopeful attitude present in childhood. The repetition of the word “gone” emphasizes the building angst around this feeling, which ultimately leads Barry to explode and lash out at her friends and family.

“Ev, if you’re reading this, hello, it’s me.”

Barry breaks the fourth wall to address her childhood friend, Ev, directly. Barry feels enduring guilt about throwing away a valuable friendship for a small increase in social status at school. She pairs this quote with a real picture of her and Ev in a photo booth. Readers are left wondering, however, whether this apology is better performed for public consumption like this, or whether Barry should have reached out to Ev in a more private—possibly more productive—way.

“Dean tried to say it wasn’t my mom, how could it be my mom, the lady wasn’t even speaking English.”

At the end of a difficult acid trip with Barry’s crush, Dean, he flippantly makes it clear that he has no idea who Barry really is. Despite all the illusory intimacy of their high, Dean refuses to believe that the Filipino woman shouting in Tagalog is Barry’s mother. Dean’s casual racism shows Barry how mistaken she has been about his supposed coolness; coupled with his spurning of Barry in favor of some other girl, Dean’s words here further emphasize the impossibility of him understanding or loving her.

“But she knew before I did that I was about to leave and never come back. San Francisco. Something like San Francisco was expanding inside of me and I didn’t want it to stop.”

San Francisco symbolizes freedom and transformation for Barry. Whether she ends up there—and whether it lives up to her fantasy—almost doesn’t matter. Her imagined version of San Francisco helps her picture an independent future.

“I noticed a pee smell. I noticed their freaked-out dog eyes. One guy made some weird finger gestures and started vomiting.”

Barry uses strong sensory imagery to describe the moment when her fantasy about the hippies she meets on the bus dissipates. She has been dreaming about the hippie life, which she imagined as a mixture of independence and coolness that she lacks in her life. Here, the reality sinks in that the hippies she idolizes are living a much darker, harder life than what she pictured.

“Because it certainly was a living thing. But it had a particular sort of aliveness that was different from people or animals.”

Barry describes the mystical significance of totemic objects that children hold dear, such as stuffed animals and blankets. She pinpoints the particular way kids create narratives around their objects, recognizing that their “aliveness” is closer to that of storytelling than to a human or animal sentience.

“The blankness spread itself. An opaque stain where knowing and believing meet. A gap of nothing. His silhouette.”

Barry uses writing and drawing imagery to describe the feeling of numbness that she feels after a friend dies by suicide. Her “blankness” is that of an empty page, while the “opaque stain” evokes an ink blot—a blackening out of white space that doesn’t allow the page to ever be marked with words or pictures. The materials to create meaning are there, in other words, but Barry’s mind refuses to make use of them. In this case, the tools of expression Barry usually finds helpful—writing and drawing—cannot help her process the narrative around this loss.

“We kept her history in mind and she revealed her nature to us.”

When training her traumatized dog, Ooola, Barry realizes that punishment and forced submission will not work to help improve the dog’s behavior. This passage reveals that Barry sees fear-based acting out as different from the dog’s true nature. Counterintuitively, to reveal the dog’s real personality, separate from Ooola’s lingering reactions to previous abuse, means fully accepting and empathizing with the dog’s history.

“Would she have been a more momish mom if the war had never happened? Would I have been a more girlish girl? Or would we have turned out the way we were anyway?”

This rhetorical question points to a central theme of the book, the Impact of Trauma on Identity. Barry wonders if what she and her mother survived as children hinders their ability to perform social roles according to conventional standards. Barry looks at these social roles through an intersectional lens, recognizing that race, class, and past trauma can affect how people perform these roles.

“If you could have taken me and Mariko and mixed us together, stirring until our mothers dissolved, you would have gotten Norabelle, true power-puff girl.”

Barry uses chemistry imagery to imagine combining herself with her friend to generate a third person—the mythically awesome “true power-puff girl,” a description that references popular cartoon superheroes. The idea of dissolving their mothers out of themselves reveals that Barry sees her mother’s impact on her identity like a chemical suspension, a substance that is all mixed up inside of her, but theoretically could be purged. Not explicit in this image, but obviously present, is that fact that by purging herself of her mother, Barry would also be purging the Filipino part of herself, since Barry’s father is white—a layer of racially inflected meaning that Barry does not explore.

“Every adult has seen the bad guy win a thousand times. So why do we tell so many stories where the opposite happens.”

Barry often uses rhetorical questions in her writing; they are both reflective and build rapport with readers, who are prompted to also consider what Barry is asking alongside her. Here, she wonders why we favor happy endings in storytelling even though they do not reflect real life. This question introduces a personal investigation that describes storytelling as the only place to reliably find hope.

“Classic stories I never read, but I lied about because I was scared it was proof I wasn’t really a writer.”

Barry uses reversed grammatical constructions to demonstrate her insecurity and feeling that she is lacking as a writer due to her upbringing. The sentence sounds like someone apologizing or feeling defensive. Barry couches her perceived lack of erudition by transposing normal word order: The phrase “[c]lassic stories I never read” literally backs into this admission rather than leading with the more grammatically traditional “I never.” Her lack of exposure to these canonical texts makes Barry vulnerable to the condescending attitude of privileged literary types. Ironically, Barry would eventually become one of the literary types she finds invalidating here, as her work becomes featured in higher-brow publications such as The New Yorker magazine.

“Especially because I’m sure that the nine-year-old version of me who made up all those classified stories would think that this one had a very happy ending.”

In one of the most hopeful moments in the graphic memoir, Barry tenderly reflects that her younger self would have been proud of the artist she has become as an adult. This moment provides a strong justification for all the hopeful happy endings favored by storytellers—they gave young Barry enough hope to continue creating.