By 2008, three years in, my research into the life of Maria Lani had stalled. I had plumbed archives in Paris and New York. I had made (what seemed to me at least) monumental discoveries, including her real name and age, but I despaired of finding enough material to fill an entire book, as I’d once hoped I could. I glimpsed the option to pad out the biography with historical context, but disliked such books.
I had never been much interested in comics and graphic novels, due to my own ignorance of their possibilities, but a new one caught my eye—Logicomix. The product of two authors and two illustrators from Greece, it told the story of Bertrand Russell.
After I devoured it, I had the thought, well, if a graphic novel can bring alive the history of the philosophy of logic, it can really do anything, and wouldn’t the biography of Maria Lani, an eminently visual story, be a particularly strong fit? Moreover, an artist could do what I couldn’t, stretch her story to book length while enhancing rather than diluting it.
I went looking for an illustrator, but found that most of my favorites, even if they were interested, were booked out for two to three years. At the time, that seemed like an interminable wait to me—little did I know how long the book would ultimately take!
At my daughter’s school, I found an extremely talented graduating senior who warmed to the project, and had loads of free time, but who flaked shortly after signing on, to follow her lover to Brattleboro, Vt., and work at a café and study yoga, much as I would have done at her age (minus the yoga).
By 2013, I had essentially given up on the book. Again. But meanwhile, I couldn’t help continuing to dig through archives for more information, and to tell her story at every party I went to. There are certain stories I can never stop telling, and these are the ones I know are worth sticking with no matter what.
At a friend’s art opening in Easthampton, Mass., I saw my wife, the writer and artist Alex Hart, beckon me from across the room into a conversation she was having with a long-bearded, shaggy-maned man a decade younger than me who looked like he had just emerged from the backwoods after a long day felling trees, the artist Zachary Pinson.
“Jon, Jon, you gotta see his comics!” my wife exclaimed as she jammed Zack’s phone in front of my eyes.
