Lee Lai

And I really thought at that point in my life that if I could just figure out that stuff and then do it, you know, like transition and come out as queer and like live that life, then I would have figured it out.

And that is so not how it's gone.

And I think that is a lot of my friends' experiences as well.

And I'm very touched when I write about hyper-specific things like queer experience.

And then some straight man in his 50s tells me that he's read the book and shares all of these details about the stories that I've written.

that he resonated with.

Like that is just the, that is the stuff of why we write, you know, like that is just a thrill to me.

She is a very service-oriented, very quiet person who really values showing up for her loved ones and a sense of duty in her relationships.

And one of the restrictions that I like to put on myself as a writer of comics is that I only write in dialogue.

I don't use narrative prose anywhere in the comic.

And that's something I really enjoy.

I love dialogue.

I love writing in dialogue and I love conversations.

But when you're doing a psychological portrait of someone who is quite stoic and it's meant to be about their internal world,

I think halfway through the book, I really started to reckon with the challenge of that restriction in relation to creating this character.

And so it put a lot more emphasis or pressure maybe on the little tiny expressions in her face or the little shifts in her body language to kind of show and illustrate the slow breakdown of her peaceability, I guess.

I mean I wanted to depict a relationship between two friends who found each other you know in a point where they're figuring out their identities which you know in this situation was about 15 years prior

and then illustrator friendship which is no longer bound by those identities like maybe there is no longer a sense of scarcity in that or it's no longer something that they're both thinking about in that way um it's just you know the day-to-day dirt of life and doing life together and yeah they really are a study in opposites trish is very outward and canon is very inward and trish is quite entitled um and canon is quite self-effacing and

I wanted to show the ways in which those opposites can grate against one another, but also the ways in which they enable some beautiful things in each other.

I think Trish is in many ways the antagonist, but she also, I think, pushes Canon in ways that Canon needs to be pushed.