Molly Crabapple, a critically acclaimed New York-based artist and writer, has an illustrated memoir coming out this December titled Drawing Blood.
The book will detail Crabapple's early career up to her most recent work:
I'm pleased to announce that I just signed a deal with HarperCollins for an illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood. It will cover my start as a model, fire eater and portraitist to my new work chronicling of protest movements.
Crabapple's publisher, HarperCollins, provided BuzzFeed with some of the book's interior art, as well as the cover and her thoughts on it:
Who designed the cover?
Molly Crabapple: It was a collaborative effort, with my illustration, photography by Clayton Cubitt, styled by Katy Wedlund, and design by Gregg Kulick.
What do you hope readers take away from the cover art and from the memoir itself as well?
MC: Book covers are a strange medium, right? Part art, part advertising, and a situation in which you want to hint at the contents in a subtle way, and also lure the viewer skimming past your cover on the shelves, or on a screen, to stop. When I was drawing the cover, I wanted to evoke that hallucinatory mashup between dream New York and real New York. Drawing Blood is a book about my life, and it's also a book about New York City – this false, lovely, perpetually dying and rising place that seems at this moment so sucked of anything real.
Did illustrating the memoir change how you felt about the experiences you were writing about?
MC: Even though you always fact-check it to death, memoir writing can feel like a lie, if only because lives can't be compressed into story arcs without losing the grain of living. The same truth goes for representing memory in drawings. It's a strange thing to look back on your past for visuals, and visual art is always objectification.
Is there anything else people should know about the cover (or the book)?
MC:Drawing Blood is a book about becoming an artist, and about how art can bleed into the world. The book includes 126 pictures, and 90,000 words. It took two years, and nearly killed me.
