Excuse Me with Liana Finck
How do you make space for yourself in the world when you’re shy and a little bit weird? If you’re cartoonist Liana Finck, you channel the stuff stuck in your brain into your art — and find out a lot of people actually feel like you, too.
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Liana is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and a wildly popular cartoonist on Instagram. Her newest book, Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self, is a collection of drawings about dating, love, sexism, anxiety, and all the absurdities of city life. We talk with her about getting comfortable with a public persona, processing feelings through drawing, and…crying at job interviews. She’s a delight, and you are gonna love this episode.
There’s a real good feeling in sharing something with strangers… I’m saying, “this is no longer my private shame, this is something we all share.”
On the agenda:
- Drawing as a form of understanding yourself. “I’m trying to explain something to myself that I didn’t have words or pictures for before.”
- Being a shy person. “I think I was shy because I knew I was strange in a way that I couldn’t quite define and I was very afraid of being found out. And the sadness I think arose from the shyness… I was afraid of showing myself and I felt trapped and helpless and out of control. And I think that has a lot to do with something that society didn’t find me exactly what they ordered.”
- Putting yourself out there. “If I only did what was comfortable to me, I wouldn’t be able to make a life at all. I’m so used to stretching myself that I’m always doing it.”
- Breaking into the New Yorker. “I would come into the New Yorker once a year for many, many years… I would be the only newbie, and also the only woman, and also the only young person. And also of the young people — if there were any young people — the only one who didn’t go to Harvard.”
Plus: Handling professional rejection, rejecting others, and what to do when you wake up and realize…you’re a gatekeeper in your field.
☞ And there’s always a full transcript.
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