Lee Lai

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Oh, God.

I mean, look, I chose comics because I like sitting in a quiet room and drawing.

And so the part where you fly around and you meet a lot of people, it's thrilling and it's also quite nerve wracking for me.

So I feel quite nervous, but also very pleased.

It's a kind of a funny little strange story about difficult friendships and like the other things I write, it's somewhat unresolved and so I did not think –

it would do very well.

I really thought that in the way that in the world platonic relationships are undervalued, I think I assumed that because it is fixating on a platonic friendship that maybe it would not be interesting to readers.

I mean, I don't know if we ever stop coming of age.

I've been talking to my parents who are both in their early 70s, and they just seem to both be feeling like they're just being, you know, having the pie of life continuously thrown in their faces.

They're constantly learning things about themselves and about the world that is shocking and surprising to them.

And so I think if you're just generally paying attention and inclined to question things, it never stops happening.

But the second part for me,

comes from this idea that the first coming of age is in your adolescence and then you hit adulthood and then you're just doing adulthood.

And that is not at all the experience that I've had of adulthood.

And so in that sense, it is the next step of adulting where you're letting go of this idea of your youth and looking ahead with the kind of confusion of what actually is adulting.

If I'm no longer young, what is being an adult and what parts of my youth can I still hold on to and what parts do I have to let go of?

Absolutely, which for me was in my teenage life.

Like I came out as queer when I was a teenager and then came out as trans when I was like a later teenager or in early adulthood.