Yes, I finally found Mr. Right. He’s sitting on my lap in the picture.

No, I never found a swimsuit, but I’m perfectly happy wearing my baggy sweatsuit to the beach now. A whole new kind of hot.

I was blessed to have the amazing format of a comic strip in which to dump all my aggravations for 34 years. I got to bond deeply with millions of women and their wonderful mothers in our dating, dieting and dreaming years. We all helped each other know we weren’t alone.

It was also a lifelong dream to get to express more than what could fit into the boxes of a comic strip. The essays in Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault gave me the freedom to do that. I loved writing about all the new drama a lot of us were going through in the “grownup years,” and loved getting to write more completely than I ever could have in the comic strip about how we got here.

When the pandemic hit, some found comfort in returning to their roots of baking and knitting. I found comfort in returning to my roots of dumping my angst on paper. Drawing Scenes from Isolation helped me keep my sanity and forced me to stop buying things online for at least a few hours a day while my hands were busy with colored pencils.