I Thought You Loved Me

by MariNaomi

Jodie was Mari’s best friend through their teens and twenties. As young Mari began to explore her identity as a bisexual, biracial outsider in a rich, white town, Jodie was her constant confidant, even kissing Mari out of the closet. The two were inseparable as they sought to gain a foothold in life and love as young feminists, Jodie an entrepreneurial sex worker, and Mari working in the boys’ club of video game development in the late ‘90s. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, Jodie ends their friendship. Years later, Mari is stunned when she discovers why. Now much older, Mari is ready to forgive, but her memories of Jodie seem to have vanished. Through journal excerpts, letters, conversations with friends, and cross-country travel, she pieces together lost memories from a lost friendship in an attempt at catharsis. The reader follows in real-time as the author unravels her own mystery, examining the expectations of friendship, the unreliability of memory, and the struggle to let go.

Genres: Memoir, Comics, Graphic Novels, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Biography Memoir

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2023

About the author

MariNaomi (they/them) is the SPACE award-winning, Eisner-nominated author and illustrator of Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016, Oni Press 2023), I Thought YOU Hated ME (Retrofit Comics, 2016), the Life on Earth trilogy (Graphic Universe, 2018-2020), Dirty Produce (Workman Publishing, 2021), and the collage-comics memoir I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in over a hundred print publications and has been featured on websites such as The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Washington Post, LA Times, The Rumpus, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast and BuzzFeed. Their comics have been translated into French (Devenir Japonaise, Editions IMHO, 2021), German, and Russian.

MariNaomi’s comics and paintings have been featured in the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American Museum.

In 2011 and 2018, Mari toured with the literary roadshow Sister Spit. They are the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color Database, the Queer Cartoonists Database, and the Disabled Cartoonists Database. They have taught classes for the California College of the Arts Comics MFA program, and was guest editor for PEN Illustrated. They were cohost of the Ask Bi Grlz podcast with author Myriam Gurba, and the California Leader of Authors Against Book Bans.

MariNaomi lives in Northern California with their spouse and a menagerie of beloved rescue animals.

Reviews

[MariNaomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello! I am the author and artist of this memoir. I know I'm not supposed to pick favorites, but I truly believe this is my best, most interesting, and most challenging book to date. Thank you for reading it. I hope it offered something to connect with. Love, Mari

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long, thoughtful look at a friendship breakup, told through prose, letters, diary excerpts, collage, and comics. Mari met Jodie in high school where they bonded as rebellious teens seeking freedom from parental and academic rules. They loved the same music, both dropped out of school, and moved in the same circle of Bay Area folks for years. They were best friends- until Jodie cut Mari out of her life suddenly and unexpectedly. Years later, Mari was still trying to piece together what had happened, from lies, misunderstandings, secrets, affairs, communications lost in transit or responded to by the wrong recipient. Friendship breakups can be equally as devastating as romantic breakups- sometimes even more, as there's no societal norms on how to mourn them, and because we often expect friends to remain in our lives forever. This memoir was honest about how memory fades, how easy it can be to remember only the good or only the bad of a person colored through a specific lens, but also hopeful about the possibility of reconnection. No memoir is over while it's characters still live, and this one took more twists and turns than I was expecting! Beautiful and thought provoking.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

My feature article on MariNaomi is now up on Publisher's Weekly...this lovely, riveting new book was the catalyst for a discussion of their published oeuvre, starting with Kiss and Tell (2011) all the way up to the present.
https://bit.ly/3IekuS3

[Zareen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a deep cut into the beauty and ugliness of intense friendships. It's told in an incredibly creative and immersive format, poring over collaged diary entries, handwritten letters, sticky notes, and drawings. The reader sifts through the blocks in MariNaomi's mind as they go through it themselves. It's heart wrenching and emotional and MariNaomi's best work yet.

[Hannah Garden]

Between this and Wertz’s latest I am in hog heaven this summer. Both books are mothers as well as perfect babies, a thesis maybe I will flesh out in some dazzling writing later this year. Or maybe I will keep my thoughts to myself who knows. Either way! This book! Fuck me!!

[Lora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so personal and intimate. I loved reading the complications of a friendship. I can relate, and haven’t read anything else on a friendship breakup that’s really resonated. There’s a really surprising and beautiful arc in this, and a touching story about forgiveness, change, and how regret can sit with you for years. I love the collages too. They created a cohesive and surreal world for a lot of complicated feelings to be in.

[Steph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a tremendous achievement, a penetrating exploration of memory and relationships and the messiness of living with a changing self and other changing selves. The art is intriguing and beautiful, and it complements and enhances the story. I've never read anything else quite like this.

[Jayme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved the art and concept of this book. The whole thing is full-colour illustrations and photographs with a collage-like style. MariNaomi picks apart her friendship with a woman named Jodi, who'd ghosted her a decade ago. And just as how this woman has taken up residence in her brain, Jodi is similarly haunting the pages of this memoir.

One thing that was interesting to me, not a complaint, and not something that I think is 'fixable', but this book is advertised as a bisexual memoir, which it is because the author is bi, but it's also very focused on the women's relationships with men and whatever unrequited yearning was going on between the MariNaomi and Jodi, it never materializes into anything. I also know this is a memoir and that's the actual experience of these people. But it almost felt a little like a self-'they were roommates'-ing thing? A lot felt left unsaid and unaddressed, which is also allowed and in line with the themes of the book. So, I dunno. It's just something I thought about a lot while reading this. Maybe that's just a reflection of the inherent difficulty of being bisexual at all. Which is very relatable.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful multimedia book that widens my eyes to all the possibilities in text + art!
And such an interesting sort of self research by collecting notes, calendar mentions, texts into a chronology of a relationship. I love stories that investigate and admire friendships, even difficult ones, that feel like they should last.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Phenomenal, raw, & touching. This is the kind of art I want to make, these stories the kind of connections and conversations I want to have. I picked this up at a zine festival and knew this was a book that would stay on my shelf move after move.

[Carolee Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the format of this graphic memoir and the way it made experiencing the arc of a fraught, painful friendship strangely beautiful.

[Liz Yerby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sweet take of a friendship and complexities within. Love the comics collage format

[Ashley Palafox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in one sitting, without meaning to, the day after I picked it up. It is lovely, challenging, strange, and complicated, and so beautifully human. I know I’ll be revisiting it.

[Eli Bishop]

(Disclaimer: the author is a friend; that's why I don't put a star rating.) As I said in another recent review of a totally different book, I think the press coverage has done a decent job of summarizing what this is and why it's so cool. So I'll try to be more specific about a couple of other things. First, this would absolutely be within the realm of "comics" even if it never had anything that looked like a cartoon character or a word balloon, but I really love how the more familiarly comicky elements are sprinkled throughout; the format choices never feel arbitrary, the book establishes each of the kinds of space/text relationships and representational/non-representational images early on that it'll be using, and then whenever one of those returns it's because that's the clearest way to get across the idea at that moment. It's simultaneously efficient (in the pared-down drawing style, and the way visual shorthand like the red/green floral stuff allows for instant identification of characters whose outward appearance changes a lot over time) and generous (if two pages of semi-abstract imagery will get across a feeling more directly than a block of text on half a page, then two pages we shall have). Second, the fact that the author finds out significant new information partway through the writing process is a startling effect—and it makes for an obvious hook to get anyone interested in the book—but in another way I feel like it's secondary to everything else; that is, if they had never found that out and the rest of the book was about just coming to terms with that lack of closure, or if they had reconnected with Jodie and it turned out that there really wasn't any good explanation at all, that would just be how life happened to go and the book would still be special. Given what did happen though, I think the presentation of that process, and of the mixed feelings about it, is really strong and interesting. I'm about the same age as Mari, and I'm curious how this reads to someone who's much younger, because at the end I was struck by how well it had captured the feeling of realizing how much distance you've covered, and feeling like a wiser or at least different person, while at the same time feeling like you still have one foot in all those old unbearable and essential moments.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's wonderful when an artist you admire delivers their most complex and layered work, using the force of all the skills they've accumulated over their practice. MariNaomi's 'I Thought You Loved Me' stunned me with its use of collage, extensive personal archival materials, and stellar cartooning.

This book is a literal life's work in many ways, and the care taken with this story is apparent on every page. The delicacy of the collage work in combination with the often devastating narrative kept me deeply engaged during this reading, and many of the pages work as standalone anecdotes I'm looking forward to sharing with others.

Get this book immediately. It'll be one you'll want to return to again to admire what MariNaomi has accomplished.

[Danika at The Lesbrary]

This is an interesting exploration of a friendship breakup, told in a scrapbook style. It's almost stream of consciousness. I couldn't quite get a grasp of it, though, and I'm still not sure what I think about it.

[Nedra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mari’s books always take me on an emotional roller coaster ride and there are always parts that stay with me… that I’ll think about randomly while driving or taking a walk. Their deeply personal stories have a way of sticking in my brain. And this book, wow, this book will be with me for awhile. First, it’s beautiful. I do ebooks for most everything but glad I have a real live copy of this one. The colors, the art, the collage format, even the feel of the pages is stunning (can a book be sexy? Sure, why not). I will admit to my digitally conditioned mind getting a little frustrated reading the hand written notes… until I was overcome with my own nostalgia of passing notes to friends and thinking about the notes I still have. The first part of this book sent me on a bit of a flashback to my own teenage years, friends that I no longer have, why friendships end, reading old notes or hearing someone share an old memory that I don’t recall. Memory and perception are interesting and this book really drew that out for me. As the story progressed, I found myself reading faster and faster to find out what happened. Just drawn into the entire story. I don’t finish books this fast. Ever. And I rarely re-read books but this one I definitely will… after a few days of deep breathing :-)

[Seppo Helava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mari's books always feel deeply personal and raw, in a way that few other authors have managed. They're specific to her life, and full of details. My life is not like hers. My friends are (mostly) not like hers. But the resonance of the relationships in this book, the disorientation and bafflement of a relationship that just ... disappeared, and then drifted out of memory - oof. It hits home.

And that's the weird thing. The specificity allows her to write stories that feel visceral and personal, but still feel entirely relatable. Uncomfortably so. Hilariously so. Awkwardly so.

Mari takes a lot of risks with how the story is told. It's not so much a comic or a graphic novel as it's just a collage of memories, each conveyed in a way that echos the correct level of detail and linearity for that particular memory.

I keep being surprised by her work. I shouldn't be at this point. And yet...

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently listened to MariNaomi talk about their art and this book on a podcast and was very intrigued. I love graphic novels & memoirs, and am a collage artist myself, so I was eager to see how the two art forms came together in this book! I loved how visually stunning it was, you could spend hours just perusing the background art. It had a really cool zine vibe, and I always love when it feels like I'm getting a glimpse into an author's diary. It was also a great story that I couldn't put down. A very unique book that I can tell was a labor of love. I can't wait to check out Mari's other work.

[Johnny Elder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been waiting to read this book since I heard MariNaomi talk about it at CXC. My preorder just came in the other day and I could not put this book down. It’s such a great exploration of friendships and loss that made me think about my own relationships for hours afterward. The collage style was well suited for the story and had me staring at backgrounds and wordless pages.

I teared up at the end, of course. Definitely recommend.

[Kitty =^._.^= ∫ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got just as much meaning out of the medium as I did the message. What a beautiful & painful story about love, grief, forgiveness, and redemption. I have my own friend ghosts and am inspired to process my grief similarly.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully revealed, textured, and so expressive. I felt like i was right there with MariNaomi, haunted by a friendship that was nuanced and the source of both connection, pain, and confusion. A masterpiece!

[John R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though we are so different (ages, genders, locations, and experiences), this book perfectly speaks to me in so many ways, down to the snooping on exes and old friends. It’s a beautiful memoir and work of art, and an all encompassing self-reflection on interpersonal connections. I loved it!

[Janet Flemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a achievement! I love the way the design uses textured backgrounds and the beautifully simplified outlines for the characters. The depths plumbed are devastating, I paused at a crucial point last night and it was imperative to finish it today so I could find out the resolution.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this may be their best book yet. It's deeply moving, and I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it before, which is my favorite type of book.

[Mary Shyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I give this book six stars? WOW.

[Happyb10 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible

[Karah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am grateful to have read and bought this book. The storyline enticed me as with every MariNaomi book. (I would love to meet her and the people in this memoir!!!!) Also, it needs to be expressed, this book was bound poorly. THE FIRST DAY OF READING, CHUNKS OF PAGES FELL OUT. That shouldn't be happening. I treat my books with tenderness. Back to the story, I am delighted that MariNaomi had the willingness and openness to forgive Jodie.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic journey. MariNaomi's memoir is innovative in form and content. I was compelled to hear more about this friendship lost as we rarely talk about the significance of friendship in our lives, in our mental and emotional well being. The deft use of collage and illustration pulled me even further into the narrative I am grateful for this thoughtful and insightful book.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

A visual memoir

California artist/author MariNaomi (they/them) is an author/illustrator with works in such publications as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The LA Times, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, and BuzzFeed among others. Their visual arts have been presented in the De Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco's Asian American Museum and the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. They also are the creator and curator of the Cartoonists of Color Database and the LGBTQ Cartoonists Database. MariNaomi’s books to date - KISS & TELL, DRAGON’S BREATH; and Other True Stories, TURNING JAPANESE and now I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME.

This book, like some of the others, is a blend of visual and written art: every page incorporates photographs, drawings, or patterned backgrounds that serve as the stage for the written memoir of Mari. Inviting the reader into Mari’s life, a page early in the book states, ‘I will now organize the highlights of my findings as a spelunk through the memorabilia of my past. I do so in an attempt to get clarity and perhaps closure. Bear with me.’ The entertaining and sensitive story is as follows: ‘Jodi was Mari’s best friend through their teens and twenties. As Mari began to explore her identity as a bisexual, biracial outsider in a rich white town Jodie was her constant confidant, even kissing Mari out of the closet. The two were inseparable as they sought to gain a foothold in life and love as young feminists. Suddenly, Jodie ends their friendship. Years later, Mari is stunned when she discovers why. Now much older, Mari is ready to forgive, but he r memoires of Jodie seem to have vanished. Mari unravels her own mystery, examining the expectations of friendship, the unreliability of memory, and the struggle to let go.’

The story surveys so many aspects of relationships, the bisexuality of the two primary characters - Mari and Jodie - add significant insights into how coupling and choices affect friendships. The combination of visuals with the written words makes this very interesting story sing, a marriage of art forms enhances the melismatic effect of MariNaomi’s writing. Recommended
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book