Liana Finck

Liana Finck in 2018

Liana Finck (born 1986) is a cartoonist and author living in the US. She is the author of Passing for Human and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Quotes

• I so much think of the Torah as just a story and, like, a beautiful window into the way people thought thousands of years ago and the way people were thousands of years ago.
  • Interview with NPR (2022)

• I think I don't write fiction because I don't really know how to invent characters. I just know how to put myself into a character. So even when I read the Torah, I can't really fathom an old man with a beard Creator. I can only fathom kind of a childish, sweet, very flawed person taking a lot of joy in making things and then feeling really angry at herself for not making something better.
  • Interview with NPR (2022)

Interview with Words Without Borders (2014)

• I had complicated feelings about Judaism. I went to Jewish schools and synagogue and youth groups and summer camps. I’d always been an outsider as a kid. I was really shy and a little weird, maybe Asperger’s-ish, and I was really happy to get away from the suburbs when I moved to the city from New Jersey for art school. New York was a much more open-minded place, and the world of art seemed to like me for being unusual. I never rebelled against Judaism, though.

• My grandma gave me the “Bintel Brief” book that she had—this collection of letters that was published in 1971—that’s when all the jadedness fell away. I was transported...The book (“Bintel Brief”) is a collection of short stories based on letters written to the Yiddish advice column “A Bintel Brief” that ran in the newspaper the Forward beginning in 1906. The letters were very intense—they were by new immigrants to the United States from Eastern Europe, and they deal with a lot of life-or-death issues—but they are also funny, weird, and sweet.

• I love them! I was reading Miss Manners for a while (that was Judith Martin). I watch The Steve Harvey Show sometimes, and I love Judge Judy. I watch Kathy Lee and Hoda (this is only at the gym, so it’s only in the winter, when I’m running on a treadmill!). Since I wrote this book I’ve been really into talk radio and podcasts in which people have mundane conversations. I just want to hear people talking about their lives.
  • Responding to "Do you ever read modern advice columns?"

• The shadow represents my strangeness and my creativity—my soul, which I used to run from in hopes of learning how to fit in.

Interview with Comics Beat (2018)

• I’m alone a lot so I think I draw as a way to get my feelings out when I’m not with people.

• I think that’s when I realized that my favorite thing to write is about my life, but with some fictional things thrown in. I think that’s a good thing to do with comics because I think the line between fiction and truth is blurred in comics in a way that it is isn’t in writing because in writing with magical realism it’s really obvious that you’re lying. In a comic, you could just like draw a ghost there and you don’t need to explain why it’s there. It’s a lot simpler and less involved

• It’s a story about these quiet stories women pass on from generation to generation. It’s a thing women do because we aren’t historically the writers or the artists, so our stories are more personal and quieter...At least in my mom’s generation and earlier women were pushed by society to channel everything in their being into being a good mom and a good wife and making a smaller world for their family.

• I think a movement of women coming forward and saying we’re not what society says we are should also be a men’s movement. I wish men would be evaluating themselves. I see a lot of defensiveness in the bad men and a lot of ‘I’m not going to talk about myself, let’s only talk about women’ in the good men and that’s kind of a shame.

• I like having an audience. I don’t think I ever work when I don’t have an audience, which is one of my great failings.

• I’m surprised that people relate to my stuff. I always thought of myself as not that relatable and maybe in person I’m not that relatable, but it warms my heart that people can relate.

• I’m not interested in details. I’m interested in the power structure and some strong feelings tend to be pretty universal.

Interview (October, 2018)

• (On one page you wrote, “if you intend to create a world – you need to leave the real world behind”) I think my mom believed that. I think both of us deep down have this feeling that either you can have your art or you can have your life. I don’t think that’s really true. I think you can have both.

• There have been many times in my life when I’ve chosen art over people, but like my mom, I thought it was a choice. I think that’s a very romantic notion and it’s a good notion to put in books, but it’s not a good one to live by. I think seeing people does broaden your world a lot and art will come back when it’s ready. Even if you walk away from it for a minute.

• I don’t think having a hard time working on something means it was a bad project.

• I think that’s the thing that happens in my life that is closest to art and so I tend to make art about it. I also really love nostalgic writers. Two of my favorite writers are Proust and Nabokov, who are all about lost childhoods and loves that could have been.

• I think of myself as very consciously following in the footsteps of Roz (Chast) and Liza (Donnelly) and more recently Carolita Johnson and Emily Flake. I do think of myself as a woman cartoonist in a historically men’s world. But very nice men.

• I realize I don’t like to draw any character and then I realized you don’t need to make them look like anything. They just need facial expressions. That’s how it feels to be a person. You don’t know what you look like, you just know what you’re feeling.

Interview (2018)

• Humor is like a good eye for design, it comes when you have a strong sense of proportion along with the grace to step back and not take every little thing too seriously.

• if you care too much, then you can't tell a story that moves. You can't be funny. If you're too close to something, sometimes you can't make it light or snappy.

• I don't know a lot of cartoonists who laugh a lot. I think when we hear a joke we just get still like a dog who smells an animal. It becomes about isolating the part that's funny and unexpected and thinking more about that. You get spiraled into the nuances of what makes something funny and who thinks it's funny.

• I've drawn compulsively all my life. I think Instagram is the format that comes closest to my natural tendency of drawing as a means to process things that bother me in real life.

• Something I learned about myself is that I really like to draw tiny. For Instagram each drawing is an inch or two, so I scanned them very high-resolution and blew them up. It's a strange way to work, but I think it makes sense because I'm saying intense things in a very tiny voice, which describes my personality.

• If you're a gentleman and you're wandering around in a garden and you're inspired and you write a haiku, that's real creativity. But if you have to make 1,000 cakes to sell, you're not going to put your soul into it. It's a matter of scale. I think great art is often the gentleman writing the haiku, but in order to be an artist you also need to be able to make 1,000 cakes in an afternoon.

Excuse Me (2019)

• I AM A PUZZLE
  I AM SOLVING

• NOT EVERYTHING
  NEEDS TO BE
  EVERYTHING.

• HOW TO READ A BOOK
  1. READ IT
  2. CHANGE A LOT
  3. REREAD IT

External links

• Personal website
• Instagram page
• New Yorker page