I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

by Mannie Murphy

In this graphic novel, what begins as an affectionate reminiscence of the author’s 1990s teenage infatuation with the late actor River Phoenix morphs into a remarkable, sprawling account of the city of Portland and state of Oregon's dark history of white nationalism. Mannie Murphy is a gender queer Portland native. This work of graphic nonfiction, told in the style of an illustrated diary, begins as an affectionate reminiscence of the author’s 1990s teenage infatuation with the late actor River Phoenix but morphs into a remarkable, sprawling account of the city of Portland and state of Oregon's dark history of white nationalism. Murphy details the relationship between white supremacist Tom Metzger (former KKK Grand Wizard and founder of the White Aryan Resistance) and the "Rose City" street kids like Ken Death that infiltrated Van Sant's films -- a relationship that culminates in an infamous episode of  Geraldo . Murphy brilliantly weaves 1990s alternative culture, from Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs to Keanu Reeves and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with two centuries of the Pacific Northwest's shameful history as a hotbed for white from the Whitman massacre in 1847 and the Ku Klux Klan's role in Portland's city planning in the early 1900s to the brutal treatment of Black people displaced in the 1948 Vanport flood and through the 2014 armed standoff with Cliven Bundy's cattle ranch. In Murphy's personal reflections and heart-racing descriptions of scenes like infamous campfire kiss in  My Own Private Idaho , the artist's story becomes a moral anchor to a deeply amoral regional history and marks the incredible debut of a talented new voice to the graphic medium. Two-color illustrations throughout.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Comics, History, Memoir, Queer, Adult

216 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2021

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books that is put with the graphic novels, but seems more like an illustrated essay to me, with each page having a single illustration with a block of text above or below. Oddly, Murphy has chosen to present their work on pages of elementary school writing paper, the vertical type with under half of the page left blank for a drawing and the larger section with solid and dashed red and blue lines intended to help practice printing or cursive. The text is handwritten cursive that usually does not adhere to the writing paper rules but does use the markings for alignment. After chapter divisions we are given a backside view of those pages, showing how the paint or markers or whatever have soaked through.

Anyhow, the book kicks off with the author's memory of the death of River Phoenix and sort of sketches a little bio of him, focusing on his roles in My Own Private Idaho and Stand by Me and his involvement through Gus Van Sant with Portland's gay and drug cultures. Much shade is cast on Van Sant before a segue into a history of white supremacy in Portland and Oregon through a young skinhead Van Sant knew named Kenneth "Ken Death" Mieske who was convicted for the murder of Mulugeta Seraw. Increasingly random events like the Whitman massacre, the Bundy standoff, the Mount Hood disaster of 1986 with the Oregon Episcopal School hiking group, and the crash of United Airlines 173 get pulled into the book, between chapters railing against police brutality and how Geraldo Rivera got his nose broken on his talk show by skinheads. There is a really vague attempt to make tenuous connections between some of this through the high school the author attended and the predominately Black Portland neighborhood where their White family lived.

I agree with the author's viewpoints for the most part, but the journey careens about too much between Tiger Beat worship of Phoenix and polemics against injustice that express outrage but offer no action plans or agenda items beyond, well, that sucks.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this mix of illustrated memoir/history/pop culture - using River Phoenix as a starting point and weaving in stories of Portland, neo-nazi's and white supremacists. loved the art and the lay out.

[Catalina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional read. A very multilayered and complex depiction of the unjust history of Oregon. The art was interesting and visceral.

[jude · Rating 2 out of 5]

i feel like this was a mess of like three different stories (maybe two) that the author wanted to tell, that didn't end up relating to each other much at all. to be fair, i didn't care about the river phoenix stuff, i only wanted to know about the racist history of oregon. but i expected the two subjects to at least have some connection to each other, and it just felt like the threads were very, very loose.

i had a really hard time with the text. it's written in the author's own cursive handwriting, which is messy in places, and difficult to read. i had to concentrate harder than i would have liked to, just to read the text. it hurt my eyes a little.

also, the summary and publicity for the book pointed out that the author is genderqueer, so i expected that would be relevant to the content of the book. there are some bits of memoir in here, but nothing to do with gender identity, so as someone who was looking forward to that, i felt a little misled.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew some of this history but also learned a lot. It's a weird juxtaposition of River Phoenix and young sailor husters in Portland and Oregons' racist anti-Black and anti-indigenous past, combined with the white alternative scene there, this is just a interesting combination of histories and stories that doesn't address this directly, but ends up explaining a cringey "quirkiness" that we see in contemporary Portland culture and pop culture today that might be more problematic even when its being skewered in self-aware satire. Some of the personal accounts of the white supremacist skin heads was scary, but its an honest story in that way I guess and trying to make amends in some regard. I think this is basically about being sensitive in a fucked up world with a messed up history... I don't know if it offers meaningful answers or action on that, maybe it doesn't have to, it's just explaining an ethos.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still not sure how to describe this book. And even more not sure how to catalog it in my library. Is it a memoir? A snapshotted biography of River Phoenix or Gus Van Sant? A history of white supremacy in Portland Oregon? Narratively it's all over the place, without chapter breaks or segues. It's also fascinating and heartbreaking in a way that will probably only affect folks who love the Rose City. I think every city has some pretty dark moments in its history, and I'm not sure Portland's are any better or worse than other places, but things do tend to take on more meaning when you are emotionally invested in your hometown. (BTW I ended up cataloging it as 979.54)

[Tatiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing and nearly everything in it was news to this white girl, despite being around Mannie’s age and living my whole life in nearby Seattle. So I’m very grateful this book exists and it should be required reading for Oregon schools & surrounding states. The art is tremendous and the book production is breathtaking.

[Charles Hatfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

A frustrating book for me.

OTOH, it’s aesthetically distinctive; I don’t know another book that looks quite like it. Ink wash drawings and handwritten cursive text against school notebook pages give the book a clear personality, and on those terms the production and design are excellent. The evocation of school says something about the narrator and their circumstances, though these suggestions remain just that, vague hints rather than a definite positioning. Each page or spread has an identity, yet everything is of a piece.

OTOH, the book’s announced focus on white supremacism in the city of Portland and state of Oregon never crystallizes. The text is a discursive ramble, skipping among topics unpredictably and, for this reader, incoherently. The book begins with a gushing portrayal of actor River Phoenix (and a satiric, needling portrayal of director Gus Van Sant), and spends much time on aspects of Portland’s gay male culture, in particular a demimonde of hustlers, exploiters, junkies, and victims that the author approaches with a mix of moralistic disapproval and awed fascination. Gradually, the book discloses connections among that culture, white supremacist vigilantism in the Pacific Northwest, and Oregon’s foundational history of racism, which would be fascinating if, after the long preamble, the book dug in and doggedly stuck with its examination of racism — but instead it lurches toward other topics, or vaguely circles anyway, with doglegs into infamous news stories and occasional slight returns to the fate of River Phoenix. This is the kind of structure that, in discussions of comics like Bechdel’s Fun Home, tends to get called “recursive,” looping, nonlinear, et cetera, but here just seems confused and confusing.

Comics have the capacity to juxtapose past and present on the page (a truism in comics criticism today), but that isn’t what happens here. Instead, we get a text/image relationship more like that of traditional picture books, in which a narrating text, a monologue basically, joins images, one per page, sometimes in a literal, sometimes in a more suggestive or atmospheric, relationship. The book does not appear to use braiding or layout strategies to build a recursive structure; instead, it just monologues, in a disjointed way that is held together only by the book’s overall aesthetic.

Another consequence of the book’s narrated approach is that the characters never really get to become characters, that is, to come alive vividly and work against the grain of the author’s design. They don’t get to talk; they are talked about. There are no dialogue exchanges, no sparks between personalities. Therefore the one personality that comes through is that of the narrator, who seems enthralled by their material but unable to or uninterested in giving it cohesive form.

I have to admit, less than halfway through, I became a resistant reader; I got my back up, and started to fume, frustrated. This continued til the end. The book reveals a troubling nexus between Portland’s culture of street hustlers and Oregon’s coddling of white supremacism, but the author remains a bit dazzled and the argument never lands; we are left with a blurry, insinuating vagueness.

[Hannah Garden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a little time to sink my teeth into, but once I did I found it to be a really powerful work of graphic literature.

The look of the book is not inviting you to sink into it, it's a very personal-feeling, very handmade document that doesn't aspire to any slickness of the court-the-reader variety; grey and white and black and the faintest pinks & blues in the lines of the old-fashioned school paper it's drawn on, the work is visually mushy and ripply, dingy scunge of wite-out here and there and the hand unsteady, the line sometimes becoming heavy like it's slumping into itself, letters in words and words in paragraphs.

And the story itself is not a story but many, a mournful report and not a narrative, though it does follow its author through their teens and into today.

I would recommend this to anyone who's interested in the ways graphic storytelling in service of the almost spiritual exercise of confession operates, as this is an unusual offering to that canon and I think a pretty profound one. I'm about the same age as this author and the hauntingness of River Phoenix's sad story rings really true to me, so I'd also recommend this to anyone who was young in the nineties. And anyone who wasn't, too. I think you could love this.

[elena · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I absolutely love the format and aesthetics established in this graphic novel I cannot attest to the plot. It felt choppy and dragged out. I don’t see how it is intriguing nor relevant to readers. The infatuation with River Phoenix to then transition to Oregon’s white nationalism was overall awkward and lengthy. It was a plot no one asked for. Almost like it was a waste of a perfectly good graphic novel for the use of a story that no one asked for :/

EDIT: I’m editing this now because I’m thinking about it and this seems like the author finished writing this and thought -“damn I’m woke af” without adding any sort of resolution or analysis to their own white privilege growing up in a predominantly Black neighborhood.. but okay.

[Libriar · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Somewhere in here was a good story about the racist history of Oregon but it was intertwined with a story about River Phoenix that wasn't quite connected so the whole thing felt disjointed.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

My long-form review of this book is now up on Solrad: https://bit.ly/3u918nk

[darce vader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, though I found the handwriting difficult to read at times, and the flow felt mildly disjointed even though the author was trying to weave the stories together.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Formatted like a diary with sloppy wash drawings that perfectly capture a feeling of nostalgia, though this is not a book mired in the past. It’s part history, part love letter, part memoir and no part as cliched as this hackneyed sentence began.

[Jay Dougherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will be a book that sticks with me. It's basically a meditation on being a teenager and River Phoenix, but somehow branches out to cover parts of the history of Oregon and specifically Portland and white supremacy in that region. The art is almost amateurish but it helps highlight the writing and tone. It's very 90s zine ish but I think that's the point.

[Nate Crawford · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reads, and at times looks, like a Tumblr thread from 2013. The vague, rehashed myths about River Phoenix, the incorrect assumptions about the nature of his 'My Own Private Idaho' character & his contributions to its narrative, and the wrongheaded presumption that Gus Van Sant had a sinister sexual obsession with him and the Portland youths he cast in the film all shaded the later aspects of the story for me. If, as a reader, I find holes and weird opinions in something I know a great deal about (Phoenix), I'm not going to trust the presentation of later information I'm here to learn more of (the Vanport area of Portland, etc.).
The cynic in me thinks that the publisher considered this an easy anti-racist addition to their catalogue. The realist in me thinks it's so sloppy-minded that it shouldn't have been published in the first place.

[Kate LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. It’s a nonfiction journey that explores power dynamics, white supremacy, the history of Oregon, and River Phoenix. The artistic style uses haunting grey watercolors, and the layout is unique by using 90s era lined penmanship paper. You know the kind — beigeish-grey with light blue and pinkish red lines telling you where to write. The best of the book is that it’s not hopeless- it’s a call to action: question everything, use your voice, and say their names. This book is a masterpiece and should be required reading.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, haunting, and it gives the reader lots to think about. I lived in the PNW in the early 90's and I heard and saw some white supremacy dogma, from folks whom I had met from Alaska, Oregon and Idaho, and when I traveled outside of Seattle. I appreciate the points of view from this person, since they lived there through these difficult times, and they want to make sense of how this ideology gripped this part of the country.

[Paige Pagnotta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this could have been a really great book about Oregon’s racist past & present, but it was too disjointed and interlaced with randomness to flow well. I did learn some things and appreciated the information on Oregon’s history, I just wish the different parts had been more relevant and connected.

[Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine and assured debut graphic non-fiction, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden takes as its point of departure the death of River Phoenix and uses this as a springboard to discuss the films of Gus Van Sant, the racist history of Portland, Oregon, and the ongoing white supremacist movement in that state. It is clever and heartfelt, with lovely, simple artwork.

[Beth Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow the gloomy darkness of this book was mirrored both in the subject and the illustrations. I enjoyed it also it made me depressed. Anyway, evokes a feeling for sure.

[Trista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Presented as a graphic novel, beginning with the story and death of River Pheonix, Mannie Murphy takes you into the history of white supremacy in Portland, Oregon. Besides getting a decent depiction of systemic oppression and corruption in the police force and the justice system, the author focuses a special attention on Gus Van Zandt as a groomer of young men (including River) who have problems and little to no support systems. There is a conspiracy vibe to the work in the telling of different episodes of violent histories on the streets and on t.v.: a few of these stories having some link to Van Zandt. The creepy details given in River Pheonix's death story leave you with a feeling that there was a little more to River's death than that it was just simply a death caused by an overdose.
The story is presented in written cursive on elementary school lined paper reflecting the time and the age the author was when they would have been most influenced by the events depicted. Commentaries within the book reflect on the media's role in escalating and empowering white supremacists in their enabling of psychopaths to convey themselves as martyrs, as well as pointing to underground movements and rings where sinister decisions and actions take place.
The book is a dark and violent, but interesting account of Portland's history and Klan connections and given the latest date of corruption in the police force (2014), one could also say it is a depiction of Portland current state as well. There is a disjointed quality to the narration that is a bit rocky. It seems there could have been smoother transitions between chapters. Given that some of the details and that some of the history accounted for goes back to when Portland was founded, it seems odd that the big take away is what a creep Gus Van Zandt is. A raised eyebrow is one thing-I mean Van Zandt did seem to have an obsession with very young and attractive men and a need make a star a out of a neo nazi murderer, who did make it to t.v.-prompting one to question what/who exactly are *all* the connections that enabled that to play out-but the way Gus is portrayed as a major player in the story about a history of white supremacy and gay boys in seedy circles of Portland works to destabilize the author's otherwise solid perspective.
Over all it was an interesting read, but one that I'm sure would do more in getting at and under the skin of Gus Van Zandt and his followers than it would the supremacist forces that continue to threaten the lives and welfare of marginalized people. It is not that I believe the book specifically intended to accomplish either of those things, but if one were to make a case of either/or in that regard, Van Zandt would be in the position to feel the most heat.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this graphic novel as I was looking for a copy of Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. At first I thought this was a graphic novelization of that book - the description told me it was not, but it also intrigued me. This was sort of a memoir of the artist's intense reaction to the death of River Phoenix and ties it back to her upbringing in Portland, Oregon, as well as to director Gus Van Sant and the Neo-Nazi movement. I'm not exactly sure how the title ties in to any of this, which did not affect how fascinating this book was.

[Doehour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uh kind of interesting, but weird. Mannie Murphy writes about things connected by the idea of questioning authority and “groupthink” as well as Portland. I like the formatting of blue watercolors and grade school cursive practice paper and drawn pictures. The overall tone to me felt like when you dive too deep into morbid, chilling social-cultural landmarks. Like looking up last pictures of celebrities before they die, or trying to find more information online about an abandoned building. Or doing too much research into a death or terrorist event. The epilogue is interesting, I’ll have to watch that episode now and see Ken Death and whatever’s being orchestrated.

[Liz Yerby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of interesting stuff, I love a wandering messy narrative. Lots of harsh Portland realities— I agree that more self-reflection could’ve helped the narrative, and it’s muddled sense of a memoir but not a memoir. I was excited to learn more about Gus Van Sant and River Phoenix, and Portland in general (though it’s dark, sad history.). There was some spot where I felt the nuance was working for the author and others where I wasn’t sure it fully working.

[Rose Sybrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is gorgeous yet flawed. Sections were poorly organized and frequently hard to follow, as if the author had thrown the pages in the air, lost a few under the sofa and then shuffled the remaining pages together in the order they fell. There were some misspelled Spanish words that bothered me. The book felt like an early draft that went to publishing too early.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to get a brief history of yet another racist state in America, this is your book. I'd never thought of Oregon as being a state where neo nazis go to plot and scheme but boy was I wrong. Good read!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange style to get used to, but I really enjoyed it, especially how the thread of group think and power dynamics kept it all together.

[Ella · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, that sucked.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting stream of consciousness ish graphic novel about the cultural underbelly of Portland Oregon and the memories the author has of certain events. I need to rewatch My Own Private Idaho.