Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

Lust ends up becoming downright fearful for her life, in fact, and not without justification. “Bachelor number one” is Georg, a warm, affectionate, and caring actor 20 years Ulli Lust’s senior who provides almost-fatherly guidance and stability but can’t keep up with her physically or sexually - and that’s where “Bachelor number two” comes in, a Nigerian immigrant Lust’s own age named Kimata, who brings to the metaphorical table the across-the-board excitement Georg is incapable of but comes with plenty of baggage of his own in that he’s emotionally volatile at the best of times, downright dangerous at the worst - and as events progress (and as you’d no doubt expect), “the worst” becomes a more and more frequent occurrence. The conflicting stresses exerted by all these diametrically-opposed forces goes some way toward explaining why she both missed and deliberately chose to ignore the various alarm bells that were going off in all directions as she pursued romantic relationships with two men concurrently.

Following directly on from her Ignatz-winning 2013 memoir Today Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life, Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust’s latest, How I Tried To Be A Good Person (Fantagraphics, 2019), is equally as formidable a work, clocking in at a whopping 368 pages, and equally as frank and confessional in its tone and temperament, but rest assured: it stands on its own as a self-contained work of self-examination, as well as a painfully accurate and hyper-detailed reminiscence on a momentous period of time in the author’s life and the people who made it that way.Ĭrucially, the title itself gives away both the point of view and the narrative strategy of Ulli Lust: it admits to shortcomings, if not outright failures, but also couches them in an entirely human bit of self-justification: she did, after all, at least try.Īnd it’s probably fair to say that, as a young artist in 1990s Vienna struggling to balance her urge to create with her need to take dead-end jobs to survive, as an anarchist activist looking to balance her idealism with her need to remain grounded in social and political reality, and as a single parent required to balance the needs of her child with her own need for love and intimacy, trying is probably the most - and the best - Ulli Lust could reasonably be expected to manage.

Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust