My New York Diary

An all-new edition of groundbreaking, flagship D&Q author Julie Doucet’s glorious contribution to the graphic memoir canon

In 1991, pioneering cartoonist Julie Doucet packed up her life and moved to New York. Thirty-five years later, the diary she kept lives on as a classic of autobio and literary comics.

Doucet takes readers through a chaotic yet deeply relatable time. Trouble crops up at every other turn through a toxic on-again-off-again relationship, her creative insecurities in a male-dominated art scene, her worsening epilepsy, and a tendency to self-medicate with booze and drugs. This unapologetic, no-holds-barred account of an artist’s day-to-day in her mid-20s captures the highs and lows of modern womanhood. New York’s 90s underground scene comes to life in strikingly detailed panels with messy uptown apartments, crowded punk clubs, and unmanicured, trash-lined city sidewalks in all its dingy glamour. 

Each and every panel of My New York Diary is jam-packed with the exquisitely blocky flourishes that cemented Doucet’s reputation and earned her the Grand Prix d’Angoulême in 2022. | “Dark, funny, feminist… My New York Diary sealed the reputation of Montreal-based cartoonist Julie Doucet. [It’s] a signal text: for its intimate revelations (miscarriage, drugs, epilepsy); its bold, confident draftsmanship; and its spot-on presentation of decline—of crumbling relationships and of charismatic men overwhelmed by insecurity.”—ArtForum

“[Julie Doucet is] creating some of the edgiest work about young women's lives in any medium.” —The New York Times

“The Canadian artist whose funny, feminist, and candidly intimate tales of the female psyche have never seemed more bracing or relevant."—The Guardian

“The daring adventures of Julie Doucet’s smart, hot, disheveled, and sometimes rageful imaginary self just goofing off or engaging in semierotic play with an array of mammalian coconspirators have seared themselves into the minds of a generation of readers.”—The Paris Review | Julie Doucet was born near Montreal in 1965 and is best known for her frank, funny, and sometimes shocking comic book series Dirty Plotte, which changed the landscape of alternative cartooning. In the 1990s, Doucet moved between New York, Seattle, Berlin, and Montreal, publishing the graphic novels My New York Diary, Lift Your Leg, My Fish is Dead!, My Most Secret Desire, and The Madame Paul Affair. In 2000, she quit comics to concentrate on other art forms. From these experiments emerged the collection of engravings and prints Long Time Relationship; her one-year visual journal, 365 Days; and sassy collages from fumetto comics, Carpet Sweeper Tales. She published her most recent book, Time Zone J in 2022 and was the first woman cartoonist from Quebec to win the Grand Prix d’Angoulême that same year.