Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot
By contrasting her own life with the life of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, Mary Talbot creates a graphic novel that is part autobiography and part biography. Mary's father was the respected Joycean scholar James Atherton. He was considered such an authority on Joyce that Encyclopedia Britannica asked him to write the encyclopedia entry about Joyce.
Mary draws some interesting parallels between her own life and Lucia's life. Both had very dominant fathers who neglected family life in favor of their own work; both were pressured to live up to their fathers' expectations. However, Mary was able to escape through college, graduate school, marriage and her own family. Lucia unfortunately ended up institutionalized and barely escaped being euthanized when Nazi forces overran Paris, and the patients at the sanatorium where she lived were evacuated to the coast.
The book's artwork is by Mary's husband Bryan Talbot, the award-winning graphic novel illustrator. Although he has illustrated a number of graphic novels, Bryan is known particularly for his work on Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.
I'm not a huge fan of graphic novels, but when I read a novel about Lucia's life (The Joyce Girl), this graphic novel was listed in the appendix as one of the sources that inspired the novel's author. I was interested enough to seek out a copy of the graphic novel.
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