Liana Finck

"I so much think of the Torah as just a story and, like, a beautiful window into the way people thought thousands of years ago and the way people were thousands of years ago."

"I had complicated feelings about Judaism. I went to Jewish schools and synagogue and youth groups and summer camps. I’d always been an outsider as a kid. I was really shy and a little weird, maybe Asperger’s-ish, and I was really happy to get away from the suburbs when I moved to the city from New Jersey for art school. New York was a much more open-minded place, and the world of art seemed to like me for being unusual. I never rebelled against Judaism, though."

"My grandma gave me the “Bintel Brief” book that she had—this collection of letters that was published in 1971—that’s when all the jadedness fell away. I was transported...The book (“Bintel Brief”) is a collection of short stories based on letters written to the Yiddish advice column “A Bintel Brief” that ran in the newspaper the Forward beginning in 1906. The letters were very intense—they were by new immigrants to the United States from Eastern Europe, and they deal with a lot of life-or-death issues—but they are also funny, weird, and sweet."

"I love them! I was reading Miss Manners for a while (that was Judith Martin). I watch The Steve Harvey Show sometimes, and I love Judge Judy. I watch Kathy Lee and Hoda (this is only at the gym, so it’s only in the winter, when I’m running on a treadmill!). Since I wrote this book I’ve been really into talk radio and podcasts in which people have mundane conversations. I just want to hear people talking about their lives."

"I’m not interested in details. I’m interested in the power structure and some strong feelings tend to be pretty universal."

"The shadow represents my strangeness and my creativity—my soul, which I used to run from in hopes of learning how to fit in."

"I’m alone a lot so I think I draw as a way to get my feelings out when I’m not with people."

"I think that’s when I realized that my favorite thing to write is about my life, but with some fictional things thrown in. I think that’s a good thing to do with comics because I think the line between fiction and truth is blurred in comics in a way that it is isn’t in writing because in writing with magical realism it’s really obvious that you’re lying. In a comic, you could just like draw a ghost there and you don’t need to explain why it’s there. It’s a lot simpler and less involved"

"It’s a story about these quiet stories women pass on from generation to generation. It’s a thing women do because we aren’t historically the writers or the artists, so our stories are more personal and quieter...At least in my mom’s generation and earlier women were pushed by society to channel everything in their being into being a good mom and a good wife and making a smaller world for their family."

"I like having an audience. I don’t think I ever work when I don’t have an audience, which is one of my great failings."

"I’m surprised that people relate to my stuff. I always thought of myself as not that relatable and maybe in person I’m not that relatable, but it warms my heart that people can relate."

"I think I dont write fiction because I dont really know how to invent characters. I just know how to put myself into a character. So even when I read the Torah, I cant really fathom an old man with a beard Creator. I can only fathom kind of a childish, sweet, very flawed person taking a lot of joy in making things and then feeling really angry at herself for not making something better."