By Dan Brown

Elise Gravel’s True Colors came out last year, but I only now got around to reading the faux memoir.

It was worth the wait.

This graphic novel – in the form of a fictionalized diary – is charming and deeper than you might expect of a childhood diary.  

Gravel is a Montreal illustrator of children’s books, and creator of her own graphic novels. I’m not a woman who grew up in the 1990s, but I still appreciated her book.

Off the top, I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending: In the afterword of True Colors, Gravel explains that when she was little, experts believed ADHD could only affect boys.

“I was a girl who stayed out of trouble, but I would get really anxious and I felt different than the other kids – more immature, and just . . . weirder,” she says, looking back at her younger days. She wouldn’t be diagnosed until she was 35 years old.

The rest of the story is told from her younger perspective. The first entry comes on September 28, 1991, as Gravel starts high school. It’s clear she’s dealing with a lot.

“I’ve been feeling like a mutant lately,” she writes. “I don’t feel like being me today anyway.” She is “just normal enough” to fit in with her friends and classmates, although people are always telling her she’s too intense.

The drawings that accompany her diary entries call to mind the work of Matt Groening and Lynda Barry, with a little Keith Haring thrown in.

The kid version of Elise has lots of questions about herself, and the way the world works, such as “Do I have an actual personality, or am I just a collage of what I think other people want me to be?” and “Why do farts smell worse when you fart in a bathtub?” 

The reader can tell that she is at war with her own brain, which churns out “tons of crazy ideas.”

A girl of many quick-to-pass obsessions, the central relationship in her life isn’t with her parents (who barely get a mention), but with her friend Asma, who is the only person who really gets her. The two are tight, until a third girl enters this Garden of Eden. 

Elise is despondent when the other two girls do things, like going to a movie, without her. 

Will she recover from this spiral? You’ll have to find out for yourself.

I recommend True Colors, even if you weren’t a teen girl in the 1990s. You might not get the Milli Vanilli or Sam the Record Man references, but Gravel has done something unlikely by capturing the essential truth of what it feels like to grow up geeky. 

I would put it in the graphic-novel canon alongside Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season, which was also a Drawn & Quarterly publication.

It’s just that good.

As always, would love to hear in the comments about what comics or graphic novels you are reading these days!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.