Publishers Weekly magazine has published an interview with me about “The Year of Loving Dangerously”:
Remember the 80’s? The legwarmers and the feathered hair and the cheesy guys named Chad? Remember Ronald Reagan and Bernie Goetz and the very first hints of the AIDS epidemic? Well, Ted Rall does and, along with artist Pablo Callejo, he’s wrapped it all up into a gorgeous whirlwind of a memoir. The Year of Loving Dangerously (published this month by NBM) tells the story of what happened to Rall in 1984, when he was kicked out of Columbia University and found himself very close to living on the streets of New York City.
Having just been dumped by Philippa, the love of his life until then, Rall goes on the romantic lam. He meets ladies in bars and pizza joints, and, with a combination of cheerful opportunism and terrified despair, trades nights of love for a place to crash. Rall is known first and foremost for his political cartoons, but, man, he knows how to tell a story, too. Through his travails, YOLD not only paints a sharply detailed portrait of the Reagan era, with its slick trading floors and its back-alley addicts, abandoned by society, but also tells a larger human story of getting by. To see the young Rall hustle for survival in a cold-hearted city is to feel what it’s like when you’re yanked from your comfort zone, and forced to come up with all the answers on the fly. PW Comics Week was able to talk with Rall, an accomplished cartoonist, about collaborating with an artist for the first time as well as revisit life, fashion, love and politics in the 1980s.
