Little Fish: A Memoir from a Different Kind of Year by Ramsey Beyer (review)

Beyer was already a listmaker, zine creator, and blogger, but her experiences in art school turned her into a graphic storyteller as well. Here she collects the actual bits and pieces that she created during her transition years—the last few months of high school in her small town of Paw Paw, Michigan through the end of her first year in art school in Baltimore, Maryland—augments them with her newfound comics skills, and assembles it all into a collage narrative that speaks to the emotional highs and lows of leaving everything that is safe and comfortable and launching into the unknown. While her experience is personal and particular, the events and feelings she chronicles are common enough to resonate strongly with a broad spectrum of readers. She describes her small-town life and reflects on both its glories and its limitations as she realizes how sheltered she has been and laments her lack of political commitment. As she details the realities of a demanding college schedule, her feelings oscillate between loneliness and connection; she misses her home friends when she’s at school and her school friends when she’s at home. There is some repetition in her collected artifacts and reflections, but that very repetition will feel familiar to readers who are contemplating closing one chapter of their lives and wondering and worrying about what the next chapter holds. Beyer is therefore a comforting guide, whose first year of college is marked by sure and steady growth in self-awareness, the cultivation of new friendships, and the realization that bigger ponds just mean that little fish have more room to swim.