Qualification: A Graphic Memoir in Twelve Steps [Hardcover]

From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-Step programs.

“Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean.” —12-Step aphorism

David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have.

With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, David Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront, while working an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey—of far more than 12 steps.“Heatley is a great, dark, funny, truth teller. Qualification reveals how complex humans are, how full of contradictions, what a life-time struggle it is to sort it all out, a test at which no one ever fully succeeds. I could deeply identify with Heatley’s alienation, his honest self revelations, his humor. His observations of other people and the unfolding events in his life make for a powerful graphic story.”
—R. Crumb
 
“This graphic narrative, rich in detail and reflection, shouldn’t be read quickly in one sitting but rather savorel#9