Janice Shapiro Honoria Book Launch & Signing in conversation with Carol Lay

Honoria, the daughter of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who invented the literary "summer on the Riviera" in the 1920s, is used to her parents' endless parties with such luminaries as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, at their splendid house at Cap d'Antibes. When sheltered and unsophisticated Ida visits for a summer, Honoria becomes both her mentor and tormentor, as well as her role model and, finally, her friend.

When Ida is sent away for the summer to stay with the Murphys — friends of her father, but also of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald — she travels from New York to France and, unknowingly, into the artistic epicenter of 1929. There, she meets their haughty, sullen, and precocious daughter, Honoria, and wonders if she can be friends with the prettiest girl in the whole world. In the "perfect inverted world" of adults, one of constant play and leisure — and inebriation, of course — it's the children who most acutely perceive the pervasive unhappiness bubbling beneath the surface gaiety.

Achingly sad and effortlessly funny, full of the kind of youthful sincerity unclouded by pretenses of age, short story writer and cartoonist Janice Shapiro's debut graphic novel, Honoria, is the complex story of the education of two young girls who have started moving slowly into womanhood.

Janice Shapiro is the author of Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship (Fantagraphics, 2025) and Bummer and Other Stories (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her stories and comics have been published in The Rumpus, Catapult, The North American Review, Electric Literature, The Santa Monica Review, and Everyday Genius, among other periodicals and journals. Her graphic essay “Good Grief” was included in The Peanuts Papers (Library of America, 2019); another graphic essay, “Crushable-Neil Young,” appeared in Crush: Writers Reflect on Life, Longing and the Power of Their First Celebrity Crush (HarperCollins, 2016). Janice lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and dog.

Carol Lay graduated from UCLA with a B.F.A. in Fine Arts, but when a friend gave her a crash course in comics, she found her calling. Her first independent comics series, the critically acclaimed Good Girls, appeared in 1987 from Fantagraphics. She also drew commercially for Mattel; did storyboards for rock videos, feature films and commercials, later working part-time as an animation storyboard artist on several shows. In 1990, she started a weekly strip in the L.A. Weekly, Story Minute. She has contributed to numerous anthologies, including Wimmen’s Comix and Simpsons Comics. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Mad Magazine, and others.

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