It's almost selfishness, taking care of your mental health. You can't just not do it.

I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image.

I love seeing original cartoons. You get to see the artist's corrections, like erasures or Wite-Out or patches, and you get to see the artist's line in better detail, and what kind of ink they use - whether they like a cold black or a warm black, and what kind of paper they like, how big or small they like to draw - art nerd stuff like that.

You would open a drawer, which my father had jammed full of newspapers, and the bottom would drop out. There were buttons and screws and nails and bottle caps and jar lids – the drawer of jar lids! Why? Because they're made of metal and maybe there'll be another war and we'll need the metal. A friend of mine – I quote him in the book – says, 'You have found the source of the river eBay.'

Theres something about most phobias where theres a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen.

I always imagined my little cartoons on plates for some reason.

As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you're a kid again, poking around in your parents' closet, only this time there's no chance of getting in trouble, so you don't have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.