Graphic Novel Review: Why Don’t You Love Me? by Paul B. Rainey

Posted on February 14, 2023 at 6:26 am by Gene Ambaum

Why Don’t You Love Me? by Paul B. Rainey. Drawn & Quarterly, 2023. 9781770466319.

Claire, a depressed, alcoholic mother of two, can barely get out of bed in the morning. Her husband, Mark, can’t remember their son’s name. In fact, the pair are as disconnected from their kids as they are from life and each other. Mark sleeps on the couch. The pair forget to send their kids to school. The children have are no limits on screen time or anything else. But as Mark tries to muddle through and handle things Claire seems to embrace the idea that their life might be just a dream, or that something is wrong with the world.

This graphic novel is presented as a set of what felt like landscape-oriented, black-and-white Sunday newspaper comics. Each has the title and author’s name in the first panel, and they are episodic, showing the family’s life one comic strip at a time. I loved it from the first pages when it seemed to be about two selfish adults mostly not struggling at all to be parents, much less good parents, and I had little idea where it was going (though on rereading it I can see how what happens builds from the first pages). I took months to read it because I couldn’t bear to read more than a page at a time.

By the end, after the affair and the workplace drama and the far stranger moments, I loved this book more than ever. Everyone in my family is getting a copy in 2023.

And if, after finishing it, you also want to read more of Paul B. Rainey’s work, you can find that at https://pbrainey.bigcartel.com/