Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Animators
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://kaylaraewhitaker.com/
CITY: Louisville
STATE: KY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2118286/kayla-rae-whitaker
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016006566
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3623.H56265
Personal name heading:
Whitaker, Kayla Rae
Found in: The animators, 2016: CIP t.p. (Kayla Rae Whitaker)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
d
PERSONAL
Born c. 1984; married.
EDUCATION:University of Kentucky, B.A.; New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and Web sites, including Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, Split Lip, Bodega, Joyland, and Five Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Kayla Rae Whitaker’s debut novel, The Animators, features two best friends who become cocreators, Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught. Both women meet in college, and they form their friendship over their love of cartoons; both intend to create comics. Both also share a rural background and troubled childhood. While they have much in common, Sharon and Mel have very different personalities. Sharon, the story’s narrator, is introverted and organized; Mel is wild and prone to partying. Their friendship persists for years.
Mel and Sharon graduate from college and move to New York City to pursue their dreams, and they spend a decade building a cult following before releasing a feature-length animated film based on Mel’s alcoholic mother. The film is an instant critical hit, but then Sharon suffers a stroke. Sharon is only thirty-one, but she has to relearn even the most basic activities, and the tragedy serves as inspiration for Mel and Sharon’s second film. Through it all, Whitaker tracks the ups and downs of a lifelong artistic friendship. As the author noted in a Guardian Online interview with Sian Cain, “my book is about the process of witnessing that darkness before you have the words to describe what you see and what you feel. Where do people pick up their shadows? And I think cartoons so often can tread on those shadows, without ever falling on top of them.” Whitaker added: “With anything hard to write about, there is always the hope that writing about it is a tunnel out, that there might be a sliver of light that reveals someone on the other side. … I can only hope somebody who needs this will read it. I would love that if it happened.”
Praising The Animators in BookPage, Abby Plesser announced that “it’s rare to find a novel that so accurately explores the creative process and the hold art can have over those who create it and those who consume it.” According to Washington Post correspondent G. Willow Wilson, “the emotional heart of the story–the anxiety, competing passions and need for validation that drive Sharon and Mel’s relationships–is well-wrought and evocative. We get the sense that there are real minds at work. Sharon, for all the comparative innocence she displays at the opening of the book, proves a somewhat unreliable narrator. … And while the climax of the story veers into melodrama, it’s rooted in a very real fear that we cannot escape ourselves.”
Laura Collins-Hughes, writing in the Boston Globe, commended the story, relating that “the first chapters of Kayla Rae Whitaker’s debut novel, The Animators, seemed less than promising. The setup is a slog. … Then, it got good. Really good, with stakes and suspense and an ease of storytelling that was missing before. … For the next 300 pages, Whitaker delivers a memorable, sure-handed, and absorbing tale, rife with vivid characters, passionate if frequently toxic relationships, and an insistent question: Who owns the moral right to tell a story borrowed from real life?” As Glynnis MacNicol put it in her New York Times assessment, “The Animators covers familiar debut-novel territory: the search for identity, the desire for success, the bewildering experiences of small-town misfits leaving home.” Yet “if The Animators suffers from the debut novelist’s curse of trying to do too much, Whitaker’s obvious talent with dialogue and establishing a sense of place prevents it from feeling weighed down. Also, the intensity of the working relationship between these two flawed women keeps the momentum of the novel alive.” Offering applause in Kirkus Reviews, a critic declared that the novel is “unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Biz Hyzy, review of The Animators.
BookPage, February, 2017, Abby Plesser, review of The Animators.
Boston Globe, January 27, 2017, Laura Collins-Hughes, review of The Animators.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The Animators.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, Joanna Burkhardt, review of The Animators.
New York Times, February 3, 2017, Glynnis MacNicol, review of The Animators.
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of The Animators.
Washington Post, February 2, 2017, G. Willow Wilson, review of The Animators.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 25, 2017), Sian Cain, “Kayla Rae Whitaker: Cartoon Life on the Dark Side.”
Kayla Rae Whitaker Home Page, https://kaylaraewhitaker.com (April 25, 2017).
Kayla Rae Whitaker’s work has appeared in Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, Split Lip Magazine, Bodega, Joyland, Five Quarterly, American Microreviews and Interviews, and others. She has a BA from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from New York University. After many years of living in Brooklyn, she returned to Kentucky, her home state, in 2016 with her husband and their geriatric tomcat, Breece D’J Pancake.
WORK
NONFICTION / REVIEWS
“How I Learned to Date After Drinking.” Buzzfeed Reader, January 2017.
“South Park and the Dark Comedy of Our Deepest Fears.” Literary Hub, January 2017.
“Review: Stephanie Ash’s The Annie Year.” Split Lip Magazine, October 2016.
“Review: Lena Andersson’s Willful Disregard.” Split Lip Magazine, June 2016.
“Review: Kristin Ong Muslim’s Age of Blight.“ Split Lip Magazine, June 2016.
“Review of The Rope Swing by Jonathan Corcoran.” American Microreviews and Interviews, May 2016.
“Review of Sweetgirl by Travis Mulhauser.” AMRI, March 2016.
“Review of The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato.” AMRI, January 2016.
“Review of Calf by Andrea Kleine.” AMRI, November 2015.
“Review: Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars.” Split Lip Magazine, November 2015.
“Review: Beth Gilstrap’s I Am Barbarella.” Split Lip Magazine, November 2015.
“Review: Wong May’s Picasso’s Tears.” Tupelo Quarterly, November 2015.
“Review of Super Mario Brothers 2 by Jon Irwin.” AMRI, September 2015.
“Review of Witchita Stories by Troy James Weaver.” AMRI, July 2015.
“I’m At Sam’s Club Checking the Price of Bulk Bottled Water and Hand-Crank Radios: Collapse Fiction and Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones.” Split Lip Magazine, July 2015.
“Review of Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter.” AMRI, May 2015.
FICTION
“We Do Chicken Right.” Smokelong Quarterly. September 2013.
“How Sharon Started to Draw.” Bodega. August 2013.
“Specifics of Hell.” The Switchback, Fall 2013.
“The King of Pigeon Forge.” Five Quarterly. Summer 2013.
“Come Over Here and Take Your Medicine.” Joyland, July 2013.
“Low Boil.” Still: The Journal. Fall 2010.
“Locker Room.” Still: The Journal. Winter 2010.
Kayla Rae Whitaker
@KaylaRWhitaker
Writer, Book Reviewer for @splitlippress. Debut novel THE ANIMATORS coming from Random House and Scribe UK January 31, 2017, Scribe Australia February 27, 2017.
Louisville, KY
Kayla Rae Whitaker: cartoon life on the dark side
The Animators is a dazzling debut novel filled with smart women and honest depictions of addiction. Its author reveals how it was born out of the ‘endurance test’ of time in New York, and her love of TV toons
Kayla Rae Whitaker
Kayla Rae Whitaker: ‘I can only hope somebody who needs this will read it.’ Photograph: Mark Bennington
Sian Cain
Sian Cain
Thursday 16 March 2017 10.07 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 16 March 2017 18.39 EDT
When Kayla Rae Whitaker was tiny, perhaps four or five, she would watch Warner Brothers cartoons with her grandfather. “He was a world war two vet and he liked them as much as I did. I remember him sitting there, smoking a Winston and laughing, y’know…” – she does a raspy, hacking laugh – “and I realised then, grownups can see things that I don’t see. And I need to know what that is. It was my first sense of the adult world. Kids can always sense darkness without being able to put their names to it.”
Whitaker’s encyclopaedic knowledge for cartoons, and her early awareness of adult darkness fuel her debut, The Animators. After their meet-cute at university, Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught are united by their “white trashiness” and a shared love for cartoons. Sharon is awkward, a worrier, forever lovelorn; Mel is caustic, perennially buzzing on a cocktail of something illicit, resembling – as Sharon once puts it – “a dykey George Burns”.
After graduation comes a move to New York City; where Mel and Sharon spend “10 years in a piece-of-crap studio in the armpit of Bushwick”, working long days and “giving ourselves humpbacks craning over our drafting tables, Camels drooping from our mouths, passing expired packages of Peeps back and forth in the dark”.
The resulting film, Nashville Combat, is a feature-length animation about Mel’s hardknock Florida childhood. While it is equally damned and praised by critics, Mel and Sharon struggle to decide on a second project, until one eventually reveals itself: a film spawned from a blurry, troubling childhood memory that Sharon has long buried deep, hinging on – not unalike what Whitaker describes – the abyss between what children can sense and what they can understand.
“I am really drawn to stories where children makes dark discoveries about human nature,” she says, while talking about a favourite novel – Stephen King’s It. “My book is about the process of witnessing that darkness before you have the words to describe what you see and what you feel. Where do people pick up their shadows? And I think cartoons so often can tread on those shadows, without ever falling on top of them.”
Born in Kentucky, Whitaker, 33, was the “weird kid with no friends”, who entertained herself with books and cartoons. Asking about her favourites results in a whirlwind reply: Ren and Stimpy, The Goddamn George Liquor Program, Beavis and Butt-Head; The Animaniacs; MTV’s Liquid Television. “It was Ren and Stimpy on steroids. It was so weird and super-violent,” she says, of the latter. “I didn’t quite understand it, but I wanted to.”
From early on, Whitaker was embarrassed about wanting to write. “There is a certain pragmatism in rural America,” she says, “that if you get an education, you’ve got to be something useful.” She briefly and pragmatically considered law, before relenting and applying for graduate Master of Fine Arts (MFA) courses. She got a scholarship into New York University, which boasts MFA faculty staff such as Zadie Smith, and Martin Amis as a previous writer in residence. There, she wrote an entire, as-yet-unpublished novel (“It is sleeping in a drawer”), before starting The Animators.
And she finished it – seven years later. Now, back in Kentucky, Whitaker likens her time in New York to an endurance test; she wrote 1,000 words a day, and got up at 6am to write before going to her office job (she’d also write on her lunch break, and on the subway to and from home). “New York is full of people who bust their brains on their work. Most of the people I knew had three or four jobs,” she says. But she likes the city, despite being a self-described hillbilly; she believes New York can “make you a little more enthusiastic about being exhausted.”
The Animators crackles with intelligence; Whitaker’s remarkable ear for dialogue reads as if Aaron Sorkin wrote an episode of Girls. She expertly captures the dynamic that exists between women when they’re alone with each other, when performative parts of femininity dissolve. Whitaker feels this may be a product of her own hyperawareness of being female. “The gender politics in the south can be a heavy burden to grow up with,” she says. “I was heavily conditioned to be female. The older I get, I more I realise how much that affected who I am now. I can’t help but feel that one of the reasons I write is that it is a space where nobody is going to tell me to shut up.” That’s sad. “It is,” she says, quietly.
Mel and Whitaker share another common ground: Whitaker is in recovery. In a recent article for Buzzfeed, she wrote of her alcoholism, which started when she was 15: “[it] bloomed from mere habit into breathtakingly muscled illness, the kind that can only come from a perfect tangle of genetic disposition, depression, and a penchant for escape”. She was in AA by 21.
Twelve years on, it is all out on the page. “With anything hard to write about, there is always the hope that writing about it is a tunnel out, that there might be a sliver of light that reveals someone on the other side,” she says. “I can only hope somebody who needs this will read it. I would love that if that it happened.”
Kayla Rae Whitaker
Kayla Rae Whitaker is originally from Eastern Kentucky and has an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Bodega, Burnt Bridge, and Still. She recently appeared alongside such luminaries as Lynyrd Skynyrd in the History Channel’s southern culture documentary You Don’t Know Dixie. She is currently at work on a novel about raging lady cartoonists. You can also find her on the Twitter.
The Animators
Abby Plesser
(Feb. 2017): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
THE ANIMATORS
By Kayla Rae Whitaker
Random House
$27, 384 pages
ISBN 9780812989281
eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
When we first meet college freshman Sharon Kisses, she's a shy, uneasy scholarship kid from Kentucky. But then she meets Mel Vaught in sketch class--and her world is blown wide open. Confident and unapologetic, Mel recognizes and encourages Sharon's artistic talent in a way no one has before. Like Sharon, Mel has come from humble and broken beginnings, and together they channel their personal pain into art.
Ten years later, Mel and Sharon are finding success as working cartoonists. Their first animated feature film--based on Mel's childhood--is getting a good deal of attention. But then Mel gets disturbing news from home, Sharon has a health crisis and their work is put on hold. Once Mel discovers something Sharon has been hiding from her for years, things get even more complicated.
The Animators is a big, sprawling novel about art, love, family and loss. Kayla Rae Whitaker writes breathlessly and beautifully about the power of deep, true friendship and the ways in which people--and friendships--change over the years. She tackles the big questions, creating a novel that manages to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking. And while the plot occasionally dips into minutiae and melodrama, Whitaker's deft writing keeps the pages turning.
It's rare to find a novel that so accurately explores the creative process and the hold art can have over those who create it and those who consume it. Mel and Sharon jump off the page as real, fully formed characters, and spending time with them is total treat from beginning to end.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Plesser, Abby. "The Animators." BookPage, Feb. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479076926&it=r&asid=ca35d3b54e931730bc291f92c699399c. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479076926
The Animators
Biz Hyzy
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Animators.
By Kayla Rae Whitaker.
Jan. 2017. 370p. Random, $27 (9780812989281).
Creative partners since college, Sharon and Mel's friendship crumbles after the release of their first animated hit film, a disturbing reimagining of Mel's life. After Mel's mother dies in jail and Sharon suffers from a stroke, however, they relearn how to support each other and forge ahead, once again as best friends and artists. When they visit Sharon's rural hometown, Sharon shares dark secrets from her past--the impetus for their next controversial movie. With the nonstop tension of a soap opera, Whitaker's debut traces all the big fights and revelations with care. Both women make thoughdess decisions, which readers will only sympathize with because Sharon's narrative voice is so visceral and because Mel is utterly compelling. A charismatic lesbian, she overindulges in everything: drinking, smoking, and, most of all, her passion for drawing stories most people are too afraid to tell. Serious artists will especially relate to Sharon and Mel's journey, but The Animators is recommended for anyone who enjoys unsettling dramas about people who can't escape themselves.--Biz Hyzy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hyzy, Biz. "The Animators." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474717608&it=r&asid=39a47bca8e04c90e862545196563eff4. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474717608
Whitaker, Kayla Rae. The Animators
Joanna Burkhardt
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Whitaker, Kayla Rae. The Animators. Random. Jan. 2017.384p. ISBN 9780812989281. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780812989298. F
Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught meet in an art class in college and are immediately drawn into a lifelong friendship. Both come from troubled homes and are warm and loving people hiding inside themselves. Mel is a hard-drinking, -talking, -living lesbian who appears to be absolutely fearless. Sharon is the straight, detail-oriented, introverted counterweight to Mel. For ten years, they have been getting by working on small projects--short cartoons and advertisements. When they put Mel's life onto a cartoon storyboard, create a full-length animated film, and win a Hollingsworth grant, their future seems secure. Then Sharon has a stroke at age 31. This event and Sharon's recovery give them fodder for a second film about Sharon's life. In this fine first novel, Whitaker captures the human frailties that beset everyone--jealousy, anger, insecurity, trauma, the search for love--and weaves them into a compelling story of friendship, self-destruction, and salvation. VERDICT Highly recommended for fiction readers, the LBGTQ community, those with an interest in cartooning, and anyone interested in the variability of the human condition.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burkhardt, Joanna. "Whitaker, Kayla Rae. The Animators." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371196&it=r&asid=88b0e61296f0be7a33ab10d7ec320f76. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371196
Kayla Rae Whitaker: THE ANIMATORS
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Kayla Rae Whitaker THE ANIMATORS Random House (Adult Fiction) 27.00 ISBN: 978-0-8129-8928-1
Unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life, Whitakers debut cuts straight to the heart of the creative process.From the minute Sharon Kisses meets Mel Vaught, the women are inseparable. Both are visual art majors with obvious talent. Both are from the rural south (Sharon: East Kentucky, Mel: Central Florida), united by their shared white trashiness (Mels words)a rarity at their posh East Coast liberal arts college. And both have a passion, an unquenchable thirst, for comics. Im gonna be a cartoonist, Mel says, the first night they hang out. Animate. What else is there? By graduation, they are not just best friends, but also artistic partners. Ten years later, theyre living and working together, still in a piece-of-crap studio in Brooklyn. They make small, thoughtful cartoons and out-of-mainstream animation shorts for a thinking womans audience, according to critics. Their first full-length feature, an autobiographical project based on Mels childhood, wins them an ultraprestigious grant. They are a perfectly mismatched pair: Sharon is curvy, consistent, and perpetually lovelorn; Mel is thin and gay, the life of the party. But transforming their private pasts into public art comes at a cost, and as the novel progresses and both women are struck by different kinds of tragedies, Sharon and Mel are forced to come to terms with their families, themselves, and the painful limitations of their bond. Sweeping and intimate at once, the novel is an exquisite portrait of a life-defining partnership. Whitaker captures the shifting dynamics between Mel and Sharonbetween all the characters, reallywith such precision and sharpness that its hard to let them go.Empathetic but never sentimental; a book that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kayla Rae Whitaker: THE ANIMATORS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181870&it=r&asid=33c66d24080fddf6c4637088441850c9. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181870
The Animators
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p181.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Animators
Kayla Rae Whitaker. Random House, $27 (384p) ISBN 978-0-8129-8928-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Updating the theme of how artists turn personal pain into art, Whitaker's outstanding debut novel portrays two women working together to create adult cartoons. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses meet in a college art class. Confident, talented, and openly gay, Mel anticipates a career in animation, while quiet, lonely, straight, and inexperienced Sharon knows only that she wants to be an artist. Mel introduces Sharon to works by R. Crumb and other alternative animators and comics artists before the two women collaborate on their own dark, funny, carefully crafted work, discovering they perfectly complement each other. A decade after graduation, they gain recognition for Nashville Combat, a full-length animated film based on Mel's early life in central Florida as the daughter of a delinquent mother who went to prison when Mel was 13. Mel and Sharon struggle following the film's success: a drunken Mel rips out the microphone during an NPR interview; they argue; Sharon suffers an aneurism. Renewal for the pair comes with a new project, this one focused on Sharon, who returns with Mel to her eastern Kentucky home to confront her own disturbing memories and reconnect with her one childhood friend. Whitaker deftly sketches settings and characters: Brooklyn is all chain-link fences and loading docks and aging signage, Mel is the fire-starter, Sharon the finisher. Whitaker skillfully charts the creative process, its lulls and sudden rushes of perfect inspiration. And in the relationship between Mel and Sharon, she has created something wonderful and exceptional: a rich, deep, and emotionally true connection that will certainly steal the hearts of readers. Agent'. Bonnie Nadell, Hill Nadell Literary Agency. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Animators." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 181. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287491&it=r&asid=c73df7c0972d1527ea10fe9a708ceaf8. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287491
Book World: Can a friendship between two cartoonists survive their own success?
G. Willow Wilson
(Feb. 2, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: G. Willow Wilson
The Animators
By Kayla Rae Whitaker
Random House. 372 pp. $27
---
Considerable shelf space has been dedicated to the artistic rivalries and collaborations of men: Mozart and Salieri, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Matisse. The tension between doing the work and getting the credit - between art and its more elusive cousin, acclaim - is ripe for good storytelling, getting as it does at the passion, jealousy and anxiety that lie in the guts of the creative process. If history is any guide, two geniuses working together in a room is usually one genius too many. When the drama of real human life fuels your art, especially when that art is created in tandem with another person, the line between inspiration and theft is disconcertingly thin.
It is this tension that propels Kayla Rae Whitaker's debut novel, "The Animators." Yet unlike the bulk of literature dedicated to the pathos of creative partnerships, the artists at the center of Whitaker's narrative are, refreshingly, women. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are native Southerners who grew up poor and find themselves out of place at a snobby liberal arts school in upstate New York where both are studying fine art. Their friendship takes shape with swift impulsivity: Mel, dryly funny and finely wired, is the natural leader, while Sharon, through whose perspective the story is told, retains a kind of earnest credulity. The girls bond over their shared love of classic Warner Brothers cartoons and the darker elements of alt-comics, and when Mel makes the first of many clearly telegraphed prompts - "Let me know if you ever want to work on something. You know? Like partner up? Do some cartoons?" - their course of action is set.
That course leads, inevitably, to Brooklyn, and one of the converted industrial studio spaces that have - in real life - already begun to disappear. Sharon and Mel take on freelance work, stretch a small inheritance, and survive on convenience-store fare in the grand tradition of starving urban artists. Though their relationship is financially tenuous, it is artistically fecund, producing what we are told is a masterpiece of hand-drawn animation, a fictionalized account of Mel's childhood called "Nashville Combat." Accolades and prize money quickly follow, but it is precisely this sudden success - and the invasive press that comes with it - that sends the artists' friendship spinning off its axis.
It is here, too, that the narrative begins to wobble a little. The urgency with which Sharon and Mel's friendship is tested by fame, and by the question of whose vision and labor are more essential, is derailed by a sudden health crisis, and then again by the arrival of a childhood friend bearing secrets. The animators discover they have been hiding things from one another, and the uncomfortable proximity of art and life proves shattering.
While the creation of great visual art is terrific grist for prose, the art itself is more difficult to translate. Cartoons rely heavily on movement and timing and visual puns, compounding the novelist's difficulty. There is probably no compelling way to summarize an animated film. Whitaker, to her credit, tries valiantly, but in the end, the artistic merit of Sharon and Mel's work must be communicated through minor characters in some rather direct ways. While their partnership, which is at once fervent and wonderfully unsentimental, gives "The Animators" its soul, the closest we get to their films is a kind of narrative closed-captioning, leaving us to guess what all the fuss is about. References to animated cult classics from the 1970s, '80s and '90s come thick and fast - Ren and Stimpy, the Maxx, Fritz the Cat - but these touchstones blur rather than sharpen the focus. From an artistic standpoint, we know what Sharon and Mel like, but we don't know what they are like.
Nevertheless, the emotional heart of the story - the anxiety, competing passions and need for validation that drive Sharon and Mel's relationships - is well-wrought and evocative. We get the sense that there are real minds at work. Sharon, for all the comparative innocence she displays at the opening of the book, proves a somewhat unreliable narrator, capable of fibbing to herself, and therefore to us. And while the climax of the story veers into melodrama, it's rooted in a very real fear that we cannot escape ourselves. Sharon longs to "discorporate," to leave her body behind, yet the art she sees as her release steadily pulls her back into an insistent, imperfect reality.
---
Wilson is writer and co-creator of the Hugo Award-winning comic book series Ms. Marvel.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilson, G. Willow. "Book World: Can a friendship between two cartoonists survive their own success?" Washington Post, 2 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479737224&it=r&asid=f7088a84a27344f7825f83dc09521d0f. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479737224
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A Debut Follows Two Creative Women Bound by a Passion for Art
By GLYNNIS MacNICOLFEB. 3, 2017
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THE ANIMATORS
By Kayla Rae Whitaker
372 pp. Random House. $27.
“For better or worse.”
This is how Sharon Kisses, the marvelously named narrator of Kayla Rae Whitaker’s unusual and appealing debut novel, “The Animators,” describes her intense and often fraught relationship with Mel Vaught, the other half of the animation filmmaking team referred to in the book’s title.
It is an apt description. There’s been no shortage in recent years of narratives exploring the complicated and often intense friendships that develop between women. But in “The Animators,” Whitaker has given us something we rarely see: a relationship between two women that also revolves around business and art. It’s a connection that in many ways resembles a marriage — a shared life, passion and progeny (in this case their artwork), with all the requisite compromises and envy that go along with coupledom — despite the two never being romantically involved.
The women first encounter each other as fellow art students at a privileged liberal arts college in upstate New York. Sharon is there on what she calls the “Poor Appalachian Kid scholarship”; Mel, the blazing class talent with the rock-star personality (and self-destructive tastes to go with it), has emerged from a precarious “full-on trash” Florida upbringing. After one night of watching cartoons they agree to work together, and their soon-to-be legendary partnership is born.
The novel then leaps ahead a decade and finds the pair sharing a live/work studio space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their first feature-length animated film, based on Mel’s troubled life, has garnered them a cult following and a prestigious grant for their next project. Mel’s lifestyle, however, forces Sharon — who often operates in the shadow of Mel’s oversize presence — to keep the business running while Mel runs wild on drink, drugs and women.
When Sharon suffers a debilitating medical setback, the tables of their relationship are turned, forcing Mel into the position of caretaker and Sharon into the spotlight. At the behest of Mel, who wants to use Sharon’s recovery as the basis for their next feature, they delve deep into Sharon’s past by way of the List: a “secret compendium of every man with whom I have ever fallen in love,” in which drawings of “unseemly things appear.” Using the List as their guide, the women set out on the road first to visit Sharon’s family in Kentucky, and then to track down a boy she knew as a child, who holds the key to the traumatic memories that are haunting her.
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“The Animators” covers familiar debut-novel territory: the search for identity, the desire for success, the bewildering experiences of small-town misfits leaving home for the bright lights of New York City. But Whitaker turns these motifs on their heads simply by changing the direction of the road and populating it with women. New York success is left behind in favor of rural America — “where a man will hit a woman in public just as easily as he’ll open the door for her” — a place sketched out with convincing ease by Whitaker, a Kentucky native. Sharon, who begins as an updated version of Sal Paradise or Nick Carraway, manages to draw herself (literally) into the starring role of her life and work, instead of simply chronicling the lives of those around her.
Throughout, Whitaker repeatedly questions whether it’s possible to tell one’s story without robbing another person of theirs. “It makes you both thieves,” Sharon’s boyfriend insists upon discovering his life is the subject of her new film. She disagrees. “That story in there is mine. It belongs to me,” she counters. “This is what I do and you know it. We don’t need your consent.” Maybe not, but as the characters in this novel repeatedly learn, the freedom to tell one’s own story often comes at a steep price.
If “The Animators” suffers from the debut novelist’s curse of trying to do too much, Whitaker’s obvious talent with dialogue and establishing a sense of place prevents it from feeling weighed down. Also, the intensity of the working relationship between these two flawed women keeps the momentum of the novel alive.
Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir, “Good Driving,” will be published next year.
A version of this review appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘That Story in There Is Mine’. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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