“I wanted the book to be like a sketchbook, like somebody’s diary that you found in a flea market. A secret story.”
In her graphic-novel-cum-memoir My Sunburned Summer, TATIANA VON FURSTENBERG returns to 1987. With the delicate, dreamlike drawings of Jessika Wood, von Furstenberg becomes 14-year-old Augusta, who discovers her father is gay while on summer vacation. – PETER DAVIS
My Sunburned Summer feels cinematic.
I wrote it as a script. The artist Jessika Wood, who I collect, is incredibly expressive, sensitive, and very emotionally complex. Her art kind of stays young. I had this idea to take my script and direct her. I would assign drawings, and enact them with visuals, photographs, wardrobe, décor, and body language. There are over 600 drawings in the book. The pictures were on little scraps of paper napkins. She’s very eccentric. We laid it out like contact sheets—it was like editing a movie.
A lot happens for Augusta on summer vacation in the Mediterranean.
It’s a traumatic two weeks for the whole family. The family breaks apart, and then Augusta brings them all together again. While she’s in the hospital, Augusta wishes she had a pen and a paper to sketch her way out. That’s my process too. I make sense of things by writing my way through them. I wanted the book to be like a sketchbook, like somebody’s diary that you found in a flea market. A secret story.
Augusta is totally you.
It’s completely inspired by the truth. Summer vacations were spent with my dad and brother. We would go to Mykonos or Capri. My dad and I were only ever together on vacation, we never lived together. But it felt like we traveled the whole world as one. Almost all of Augusta is me and almost all of Leroy is my dad.
“It was a way to spend more time with my dad again.”
I wish your father [Egon von Furstenberg] had been able to read the book.
He would’ve loved it. My dad had a lot of respect for my writing. We share so much. I felt like him physically—we had the same gap teeth, the same smile and the same mischief. The book is like looking through my favorite summer vacation snapshots and entering them. Creating it was a way to spend more time with my dad again.
You’ve directed a movie [“Tanner Hall”], cut an album [Playdate], written a graphic memoir, and curated the art show “On the Inside,” which advocated for those who are incarcerated.
My mom thinks I’m an installation artist. She might be right—I’m a storyteller. Art for me is in the making. I’ve never been good at peddling the art, or even necessarily wanting to. With this book, I put it out into the universe. It takes bravery to put yourself out there.
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