Chester Brown - I Never Liked You

Today I will be posting about another little indie book that I’ve run into.  Back before I even started reading comics regularly, my sister borrowed a book by Chester Brown from the library.  Many years later, I bought my own copy of the autobiographical graphic novel ‘I Never Liked You’.  Written and drawn by the eccentric Chester Brown and published by Drawn & Quarterly, the book recounts his childhood focusing on his early love life.

The biggest draw of this book, and any autobiography like it, is the outright raw honesty.  Brown doesn’t shy away from baring his flaws, and seems to gloss over his eccentricities in a very matter of fact way.  Because of this, ‘I Never Liked You’ is very sincere and seems almost voyeuristic.  At the end of the book, Chester talks directly to the reader and goes play by play on any of the story points he feels he embellished or may not be accurate.  I really appreciated this when I read it because it made the book more genuine and showed that Brown went out of his way to portray his memories as accurate as possible.  Up next on my reading from Brown is another autobiography 'Paying For It', where he writes about his various encounters with prostitutes.