This Beautiful, Ridiculous City
Cartoonist: Kay Sohini
Publisher: Ten Speed Graphic
Publication Date: January 2025
As I begin to discuss Kay Sohini’s wonderful new graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, I think it’s important to reveal something personal about me — I am currently in the process of trying to move to New York City. Normally, I don’t like to reveal anything about myself in reviews, and certainly not right at the top of one. But it feels like I have to here in order to effectively discuss my experience with This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, because much of this book is about Sohini doing the exact thing that I myself am trying to do right now.
I say “much of this book” because this is a story that puts the experience of moving to New York City at its center before spiderwebbing outward through Sohini’s life to become about a great many other things. It is a book about family, food, abusive relationships, immigration, and, perhaps more than anything else, growth. It is a book about other things as well, and I think one of the beautiful qualities of this work is that different readers will likely have different lists of what the story means to them. There’s a lot here, all built atop the foundation of an honest, artful, and heartfelt graphic memoir, one that is a joy to read.
A person gets the sense that the decisions around what to include were made as patiently and as thoughtfully as the stunning, clean artwork, which oscillates from precise cityscapes to ethereal and bright sequences that convey feeling in several creative ways. The book is all coherent, because the writing is very strong on a sentence to sentence level. But there’s also a great deal of variety and surprise following its page turns. Sohini is a thoughtful and fearless visual storyteller, who has a poetry to her work and an ability to ground big reveals with relatable details. It works.
This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is also, I should note as I start to wind down here, about Sohini’s dreams of living a literary life, of making art, and of understanding her idols who have done the same, specifically those who are closely associated with New York City. Getting back to my personal reveal from the start (which I am no feeling quite queasy about, to be honest myself), I have long been fascinated with New York as a literary hub, with the many many literary figures one can associate with the city, with the energy and community it seems to bring to writers in particular. Moving to New York is hard — that’s represented in this book, too — but there is also a strong draw and a palpable romanticism to doing it. I found Sohini’s book to not only be relatable, but to be inspirational and calming. It’s a New York City story, to be sure (that much is right in the excellent title), but more than that it’s a story about making a big move and taking a risk to make one’s life better, to push yourself, and to grow into the place as well as the person you’ve always wanted to be.
This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is now available via Ten Speed Graphic
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