Guy Delisle interviewed in The Pitch on Factory Summers

Beginning with 2005’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and running through 2012’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, French-Canadian graphic novelist Guy Delisle’s travelogue books have been a balm for me during the pandemic, when travel wasn’t possible. His clever and fascinating tales of his adventures in North Korea, China, Burma, and more allowed me to go beyond the borders of Lawrence, and see the world.

While many of the artist’s books in the last decade have been dedicated to parenting advice, along with 2017’s Hostage, the tale of kidnapped MSF volunteer Christophe André, Delisle returned to memoirs with his latest, Factory Summers, released earlier this month by Drawn & Quarterly. Chronicling “the daily rhythms of life in the mill, and the twelve-hour shifts he spent in a hot, noisy building filled with arcane machinery” over the course of three summers in his late teens, it’s a travelogue of a different sort, this time to the past.

I spoke by phone with Guy Delisle last week from his home in Montpellier in the south of France about Factory Summers and his overall career.

The Pitch: Many of your past books have been travelogues. What made you want to return home and go back to your youth with this latest?

Guy Delisle: Well, I think it had all the ingredients of a traveling book, since I’m not traveling like we used to do anymore. I wanted to do that book a long, long time ago because I always had a flash of that time. And I was thinking, “Man, you know, some of these stories could be fun,” but I never actually sat down and just wrote everything that would come back from these times from my memory. After 50 years old, I thought to myself, “Well, now I can go back and talk about my memoir or my souvenir.” I’m 55, so I said, “Okay, there was no shame about doing a book about your memoir when you’re 55.”

GD: There was all the ingredients: it’s a remote place that nobody goes, you have different kinds of people, these workers, the factory. It’s very exotic for me to draw these pipes and smokes and machineries, so it was kind of a small traveling book for me. When I sat down and I started to note, I at first I thought it wouldn’t be a book – it would be a few short stories or something small, but then as I was writing– because I have a very bad memory–I realized that it was all coming back easily, actually.

After a few days, I had enough material on three pages of short stuff that I wanted to put in the book that I thought, “Hmm. I think I can do a book with that,” and it worked really fast after that.

TP: Was Factory Summers inspired at all by the fact that, in addition to you getting older, your children are getting older and that has offered you a unique perspective on that time?

GD: Yeah, ’cause my son is 17 and I think one of the motivation was, “I’m going to make a book and give it to him and he’ll be able to see at your age, you know, I was working at the factory,” just to see how what kind of old father I can be. Of course, the book evolved a little bit, then—now that I’m thinking about it—probably because my dad passed away as well, a few years ago. I don’t really go into intimate stuff when I write my books. I don’t really like that, and this one is a bit more [intimate]. I don’t think I would have done the book like that if my dad was still alive. Now that he’s gone, I can just talk about him. There’s no hard feeling.

Read the rest at the link above.