A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings

“A Pros and Cons List for Strong Emotions is a memoir full of love, humor, and pain. It’s a story any mother would be proud for their child to have written, and a story any child should be proud to write.”

Will Betke-Brunswick has taken two painful stories, each of which could have formed the basis of a memoir, and somehow managed to merge them into a taut, compact book. One is the story of their coming out as nonbinary, and the other concerns the impending death of their mother from cancer.

A bit part of their success in blending these stories is not just telling them in graphic memoir form, but doing so in a non-realistic way. In A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings, the characters are a family of penguins, albeit penguins with a very anthropomorphic life: they live in a two-story, suburban house; they do jigsaw and crossword puzzles; they play hockey; they discuss what genderqueer means; and one of them has colon cancer.

On one hand, this transformation of human characters into birds holds us at a distance, keeping us from a more complete identification because the characters and their stories don’t seem quite real. On the other hand, it is precisely this sense of distance that creates a sense of restraint, without which the memoir could easily have become an exercise in bathos. The unconventional form allows Betke-Brunswick to avoid the traps.

Betke-Brunswick, who is the author, illustrator, and central character, is their own strongest creation, trying to grapple with normal coming-of-age issues, while also negotiating a complex maze of gender expectations and identities, none of which feel right to the persona. This would be a huge burden on any young person—even if their mother was not also terminally ill. The father in the story is also masterfully drawn, trying understand his birth-daughter’s transformation into someone neither quite male nor female. His job is complicated, of course, by trying to understand and prepare for his wife’s impending death. This is a man (or penguin) who has far too much on his plate. With both wife and child, though, he does his confused, befuddled best, often falling short of the mark, but never seeming less than loving.

Oddly enough, one of the weaker creations is that of the mother, who never complains and is always supportive and instinctively understanding of the entire family’s struggles, even as she grapples with her own mortality. She is almost too perfect a being to be true—almost literally the angel in the house. One wishes that—just once—she would break down in tears or lose her temper. It never happens. Perhaps her real-life counterpart was similarly infallible. Perhaps Betke-Brunswick can be forgiven for making her seem so.

One of the interesting motifs in the story is that of inverse transformation. As Betke-Brunswick trades skirts for shorts, plays hockey, joins Frisbee teams, and becomes more masculine in their presentation, they are making plans to study abroad and enter life on an adult playing field. Meanwhile, their mother loses her hair, loses her strength, and spends increasing amounts of time in bed. The two characters are on conflicting trajectories, trying to hold to each other as life thrusts them in opposite directions.

A Pros and Cons List for Strong Emotions is a memoir full of love, humor, and pain. It’s a story any mother would be proud for their child to have written, and a story any child should be proud to write.