Lesley Arfin - Tickle Me (Book)

Perhaps you first encountered Lesley Arfin in the pages of Vice, where her Dear Diary column ran for six years in the 2000s, rampaging you the reader through the flaming youth of a Long Island misfit girl and all the shit she tried. Or maybe it was the book collection - all those searing Diary entries coupled with latter-day Lesley's acerbic responses. Or perhaps you sat up late, until late became early, falling in with the poor fucked-up creatures of Love (Netflix, 2016-2019), your heart breaking for the familiarity of their simple desires and the mayhem that followed.

Plus, there's Girls, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Betty... there's any number of ways you might have happened upon Lesley Arfin over the past 20-plus years. As a comedian and a writer and a producer, her signature ability is to channel the heaviest of feels from the excruciating kind of real-life trouble that people put themselves through just trying to live every day. A gut punch punctuated with a belly laugh.

Let's reflect on Tickle Me, and Lesley's path not travelled (until now): visual artist. As a kid, she wanted to write comic books (and damn, she still could and they'd be great). But she wasn't a happy artist in her youth, or a good one (so she thought), so she stuck to writing, up until her work brought her to the apex of the craft: the grind of network television. By then, doing a little painting seemed downright relaxing.

Plus, it was therapeutic - until it got to be so compelling it was like OCD. The busier she was - with work, marriage, having a baby - the more images came, the more paintings piled up. As you move through the images that make up Tickle Me, you see Lesley tapping her familiar depths and the creepy humour that she finds down there - but through an outrageous riot of flowers and colours and '70s Sears Catalogue imagery.

Tickle Me features Lesley's early expressions of her truth in graphic art. Glittery reflections on gender, weather, mistakes, feminism, fantasy, failure, nostalgia; her own personal language rendered in watercolour, gauche, acrylic, fibre, stickers and collage. Like life, no guarantees, other than from that from any beginning, it can only keep growing. And it has, and it will.