Pretending is Lying

Now in paperback, a “tender, affecting” (NYTBR) memoir unlike any other, and the first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet.

In a series of dazzling fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black-and-white—Dominique Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents.

The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma—a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.

Dominique Goblet was born in 1967 in Brussels, Belgium, and studied illustration at St. Luke’s Institute. Involved from the start in the creation of the experimental comics publisher Frémok, she published several books with them: Portraits crachés (1997), Souvenir d’une journée parfaite (2002), and Les hommes-loups (2010). At the same time she worked with the Parisian publishing house L’Association and published two books with them: Pretending Is Lying (2007) and Chronographie (2010), a book of double portraits of her and her daughter made once a week for ten years; both received a number of nominations and prizes, including the EESI award at the Angoulème festival and the Prix Töpffer. Most recently she has published Plus si entente (Actes Sud BD/Frémok), a collaboration with the Berlin artist Kai Pfeiffer, and a book of paintings, OSTENDE. Artist, comics author, and professor of comics and illustration, she is also certified as an electrician, plumber, and welder.
 
Sophie Yanow is a cartoonist and translator. She is the author of the autobiographical comic books War of Streets and Houses and What Is a Glacier? and the Eisner Award–winning graphic novel The Contradictions.