Ah, memories of high school. The people we loved, the people we couldn’t stand, the problems all those people caused for us. Sometimes those problems live on long after the high-school years. Such was the case for Nicole Chaison. When she got the gift of a book by one of her former classmates, she was incensed. It was bad enough that one of her classmates, Bill Romanowski, had gone on to become a very rich and famous football star. But now he had written a book too? (Well, with the help of two cowriters, but still…) Chaison knew what she had to do: She had to finish her own book.

Part comic, part prose memoir, all laugh-out-loud funny, The Passion of the Hausfrau is pure, unadulterated Chaison. We talked to her about making it.

Joseph Campbell wouldn’t immediately spring to mind when describing this book. Yet there he is inspiring the various chapter of the memoir. So what was the connection for you?
The Passion of the Hausfrau grew out of the stories from my zine, Hausfrau muthah-zine, which I’d been writing and publishing for about five years before I decided to write a book. When I was trying to come up with a structure to hang the stories in the book on, I began to notice that most of the stories were extremely dramatic and involved some sort of heroic feat or another that the Hausfrau (my character) has to accomplish as a mother (such as push eight-pound babies out of her vagina [doesn’t this deserve a mention in the western literary canon?], do battle with and eventually vanquish lice, get through the 2004 election without slitting her wrists in front of her kids, etc., etc.). It was then that I started to think about mothers as “heroes” and their parenting experiences as heroes’ journeys. I did some research, but I couldn’t find a single hero’s journey story from a mother’s perspective. What even a simple Google search (type in the words hero’s and journey and mother) reveals is that the mothers/wives in the classic hero’s journey stories always get killed off or fade into the background in order to enable the husbands and children to go have their adventures. I wondered: Where is the passion, the drama, the stories of the mother?

I was an English major in college and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces was a seminal text. In that book, Campbell lays out the structure for the classic hero’s journey, which repeats and repeats itself in western literature (see Moses, Jesus, Aeneas, Ulysses, Luke Skywalker, e.g.): The hero reluctantly sets upon his journey because of a blunder or synchronistic event; the hero receives an amulet or talisman from a crone, which protects him on his journey; the hero feels inadequate but goes forward anyway; the hero accomplishes a series of “trials” or ordeals; the hero slays his dragon (darkest fear); the hero dies in some metaphorical way; the hero is reborn and brings a gift or knowledge back to his community.

I plucked The Hero with a Thousand Faces off my bookshelf and reread it, hoping to find a hero’s journey about a mother. No such luck. So I decided to write one myself.

Why did you decide to do the book in this format, mixing prose with comics?
I’ve always written prose, but when I first started writing my zine, I was compelled to draw little comics and add them to the handwritten text. So many of my punchlines weren’t describable in words but were visual. With comics, I could also do charts and graphs, give background flashbacks, and enrich the text by making drawings in the margins and adding footnotes. The text and the comics were dependent on each other to tell the stories.

When I began to think about doing a book, my family and I visited New York City and we went to the J.P. Morgan Library, where there’s an enormous collection of illuminated manuscripts. I had an epiphany while standing in one of the galleries looking at a medieval French prayer book that what I was making was essentially an illuminated manuscript. The prose tells the story and the comics run down the sides and illuminate the text.

Are you a comics fan?
Yes!

Do you remember your first comic book?
I used to read Archie and Richie Rich comics when I was in grade school. I was never really into superheroes. I read comics because they were funny. My absolute favorite was Mad Magazine. I think the humor in Mad had a profound effect on the way I see the world, which is essentially like a big comic book. There was nothing better than lying in bed late into the night and devouring a Mad Magazine from cover to cover.

Who were your writing influences?
David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Charles Dickens, Ayun Halliday, Edith Wharton, David Sedaris.

Which artists inspired you, particularly comic artists?
Alison Bechdel, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Edward Gorey, Diane Noomin, Phoebe Gloekner, Carol Tyler, Aline Kominsky, Joe Sacco, Daniel Clowes,

What current graphic novels or manga are you a fan of?
I love Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Epileptic by David B., The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfarr, everything by Dan Clowes, The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi,

What does your immediate family think of being immortalized in the book this way?
My kids are always correcting me about the way events actually happened: “No, Mom! That’s wrong! I didn’t say that! I said this,” and so on. As my son George gets older (he’s 11), I think my stories about when he was little embarrass him. My daughter Dora just wants to make sure I remember to draw her with lots of freckles. My husband is extremely tolerant and patient. He’s easygoing about being recognized in public as “the Hausfrau’s hubby.” It’s a miracle he’s still with me.

Have your parents read it? What was their reaction?
I gave them a copy of the book when visiting here last weekend. I assume they’re reading it right now. I’ll let you know.

Have you spoken to Bill Romanowski?
Not since 1984 or so.

Would you like to continue in the graphic format?
Yes, I’m hoping to continue working in the graphic format. The way I write now is to draw while writing longhand in a notebook. The two forms open each other up. I don’t think I could write if I couldn’t draw.

In terms of graphics, I feel like I’m just getting started! I’m interested in writing a more journalistic series, sort of like Joe Sacco’s work in Palestine, in which I explore other people’s stories as they intertwine with my own.