by JULIET WATERS

Flannery O’Connor once said that if you survived childhood, you have enough material to write for the rest of your life. There are probably few contemporary writers who have proved this better than Lynda Barry. Her novel of two years ago, Cruddy, is arguably one of the bleakest coming-of-age stories ever written. Barry has more than just brilliant recall of the banal, self-loathing voice of neurotic, tortured preteens. Growing up with a mixed-race mother on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle, she also has enough experience of grim reality that she never seems to run out of pain.

So it’s good news that her recently released “autobifictionalography,” One Hundred Demons, is one of her most joyful works. Compared to Cruddy it’s downright blissful. Though it draws from painful vignettes from the author’s brutal childhood, there’s a happy ending. The protagonist goes on to become one of the greatest graphic novelists working today. In a recent New York Times Book Review cover story, Nick Hornby called her “one of America’s very best contemporary writers.”

Part therapy experiment, part writing manual, part memoir and a good part genius, the concept of Barry’s latest book is simple and first started as a comic strip for Salon.com. As she explains in her intro, it was inspired by a Zen painting exercise called One Hundred Demons, and a hand scroll painted by a Zen monk in the 16th century. In her “outro,” Barry explains the materials necessary to do one’s own black ink watercolours, and to harness the narrative power of one’s own demons.

An example of one of Barry’s personal demons, and her gift for turning them into weird resonant little narratives, is head lice. During her childhood in the ’60s, her working-class neighbourhood was spared the fairly common plague. Sadly, she wasn’t spared the plague of verbal abuse from a relentlessly cruel Filipina mother. Geeky and insecure, Barry became the perfect candidate to be branded in the schoolyard with “cooties.” Then, one summer, she visited the Philippines, where head lice are recognized as somewhat more universal. Barry’s red hair, pale skin and freckles provide little evidence of her Asian heritage. Here she was looked upon by other children as a potential source of the rare “white kuto,” since head lice tend to turn the colour of the race they’re infesting. She left promising her friends she would send the prize for their collection.

It was only many years later, while volunteering at a local elementary school, that Barry was infested. It was also at this time she realized she was involved with “the worst boyfriend I ever had.” He had always reminded her of someone, but until his head was covered in lice she had never realized it was a Filipino boy she’d had a crush on. Or was it? The more she listened to him, the more he reminded her of her mother. “I wish I could say my revelation made an instant difference, but head lice are much easier to get rid of than bad love.” Nevertheless she sends her Filipino friends a picture of her ex-boyfriend, writing on the back, “I have found the White Kuto!”

Her mother is never named specifically as a demon, but she shows up again and again like some weird Egyptian tomb painting amidst other lesser demons, like girlishness, San Francisco and dogs. So do some other potent though unnamed demons, like early childhood sexual abuse and suicide.

In her final demon, “Lost and Found,” Barry illustrates a lifelong obsession with the classified ads, and weaves it into a story about her own development as a storyteller. “Lost,” she writes in the final paragraph of her collection, “Somewhere around puberty. Ability to make up stories. Happiness depends on it. Please Write.” If Barry has actually become as happy as able to tell a story, by now she must be pretty remarkably content. :

One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry, Sasquatch Books, hc, 223pp, $24.95