Photograph by Andrew Doench
When writer Suzy Hopkins began collaborating with her adult daughter Hallie Bateman, an artist and writer, on a graphic novel about navigating life after the loss of a parent, she hadn’t even read a graphic novel. “I honestly didn’t know what that was,” she says now, thinking back.
Hopkins worked in journalism and raised three kids. The family was full of creative people and lively conversation, and she loved the idea of taking what had been a long family discussion— the inevitability of parental loss—and turning it into a volume to help others. She said yes to Bateman’s idea immediately.
Hopkins also loves to give advice, and this book would be full of it—beginning on “Day 1” after the loss of the mother, when the daughter is advised to “Make fajitas.” Following the recipe, the mother-narrator concludes “serve with fresh tortillas, chopped cilantro, and good salsa” and asks “Now don’t you feel better?” Without even offering a paragraph break, she answers her own question: “Of course you don’t. Pour yourself a stiff glass of whiskey.” Bateman’s picture shows a counter with tasty looking fajitas, a tissue box, and a large bottle of alcohol.
From the earliest pages, What to Do When I’m Gone (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) strikes a tender, personal tone of compassion and humor. Bateman’s poignant full-color illustrations visualize homey landscapes, plates of food, flowers, embracing friends, dense forests, and possessions the mother left behind, including a pink vibrator that’s accompanied by the text: “What, mothers don’t have sex? All evidence points otherwise.”
Interwoven with advice about what the daughter should do (go rollerblading, take a field trip, buy a good pair of shoes) are recipes for comfort food: brownies, chicken and dumplings, pecan pie, quiche, curry, and chili. When finding someone to share the brownies with, the mother admonishes the daughter to avoid “someone who’s going to carp about fat and calories; that’s the last thing you need.” Instead, she tells the daughter, “Look for a person who lights up at the mere mention of homemade brownies.”
Reading the book feels like a warm, honest hug. That didn’t mean, though, that the process of creating the book was easy. The women had to become something more egalitarian than mother and daughter: creative collaborators.
“I remember a fairly significant fight in a hotel room,” Hopkins recalls, and Bateman, sipping an oat milk latte, nods. The pair were on the second of two retreats to finalize What to Do When I’m Gone. Hopkins was writing in the corner, and Bateman was drawing on the bed. The problem? Hopkins was writing too much. “I was slow on the uptake of what we were doing,” she says.
Hopkins remembers Bateman saying, “I don’t need all these words.” She replied, “Gosh, Hallie, that’s half of what I’ve written,” to which Bateman said, “Don’t need it, don’t need it, don’t need it.” Hopkins balls her hands in fists and pushes them together, demonstrating the clash. “At some point Hallie snaps at me, ‘I’ve been doing this for seven years.’ To my credit, I did not say…” And here Bateman finishes her mother’s sentence, “that you had been writing for like 30 years!” They laugh. “The squabbling would be unbearable for someone who overheard us,” says Bateman, “but for us it was just part of the mother/daughter co-writing process.”
Bateman, who had never worked on a project quite like this one, had bigger concerns at that point. They had been rejected by publisher after publisher, who were wary of publishing a story that spoke so plainly of death. “I was full of doubt,” she says. “I was afraid
it wouldn’t sell and no one would want it. I just had this insecurity, which I think is a self-protective thing, like, If I tell myself it will fail, then I’ll be safe when it does.”
Hopkins nods. “That’s so universal,” she says, validating Bateman’s impulse to protect herself from the worst. But Hopkins knew the book would be great from the beginning, and she was right. What to Do When I’m Gone has had several printings and was endorsed by giants in the field of graphic illustration, like author and illustrator Maira Kalman, who said, “Taking something as monumental as grief and loss and making it handleable, even for a small bit of time, is no small achievement.”
Now, eight years later, mother and daughter have settled into their creative roles and both have changed. Hopkins has read a mountain of graphic memoirs (most recommended by Bateman) and now feels that she can “write to the form.” And Bateman has gained some of her mother’s confidence that the work they produce will be of interest to audiences. Their projects have leveled up, too.
Their latest collaboration, What to Do When You Get Dumped (also from Bloomsbury), explores what might be the most tender territory a mother and daughter could excavate together: the reconfiguration of their family unit following an admission by Bateman’s dad, Hopkins’s husband of more than 30 years, that he’d fallen in love with a former girlfriend. While When I’m Gone is about hypothetical grief, When You’ve Been Dumped is about the real thing.
“This was a lot more emotional,” Bateman says, looking at Hopkins. “It was your real life and your actual story.”
Photograph by Andrew Doench
Hopkins recalls that at the moment her husband, who is referred to as X in the new book, announced his change of heart, “the marriage was just over.” But that didn’t make the years ahead any easier.
If the first book was Hopkins’s advice for Bateman, What to Do When You Get Dumped was Hopkins’s advice for herself. Like the first book, it’s written directly to a person who is going through a break-up; the first entry is titled “Dumpee Bill of Rights.” “I wanted to find some resource,” she says. “I mean, I’m pretty type A. I wanted to know that if I do A, B, and C and then follow it up with L, the package will magically help me get over this stupid marriage. Well, there wasn’t any such guide, and it took much more energy than I expected.”
The break-up happened two days before Hopkins’s retirement, just months before the publication of her and Bateman’s first book. Suddenly Hopkins was in an entirely new chapter without a roadmap. She did a lot of yard work, trying to lose herself in daily physical labor. She also started trying to figure it all out the way she knew best, by writing.
In an attempt to gain some perspective immediately after the break-up, Hopkins sat down to make a list of the worst things that ever happened to her, a process that’s memorialized in Dumped on a page titled “Think the Worst.”
Hopkins was comforted that getting dumped ranked third on her personal list of worsts, behind childhood terror of an alcoholic father and the loss of a beloved sibling to suicide. It wasn’t, in fact, the worst thing that ever happened to her. But as she was working on the list, initially only for herself and not for public consumption, X visited to pick up some of his belongings. “What are you working on?” he asked. Unprepared to deflect the question, Hopkins showed him the list.
“Mom!” Bateman cuts in, horrified, when Hopkins relates this story during the interview. “I didn’t know that! Are you serious?”
As I watch them interact, I interject, “Was this the time that X said, ‘Oh God, I miss the dogs?’ ” I was referencing another memory from the book, which appears on a page titled “Prepare for the Aftershocks.” It shows Hopkins, tears streaming down her face, with her eyes closed and arms folded on a table in front of her. A compassionate looking dog watches her from his spot in front of a toasty fireplace. The text reads: “A few days later [after the break-up], X may restate how difficult this split is for them, the terrible angst they’re experiencing, admitting in a voice heavy with heartache, ‘God, I miss the dogs.’ ”
The women burst out laughing at my reference to this scene. Though I’d never met them, the book had been so specific I felt I already knew them well.
Bateman champions specificity when creating the books. “There’s so much power in that,” she says, pointing out that a book about generic break-ups without any examples from Hopkins’s story wouldn’t be “much of a book.” Though it includes a ton of advice (“Tell Your Story,” “Set Boundaries,” “Nourish Yourself”) the book is also at a fundamental level Hopkins’s memoir.
Bateman’s desire for specificity combined with Hopkins’s compulsion to take careful notes resulted in amazingly vulnerable disclosures. The insights are beautifully conveyed via words and pictures, and the book gently flows from the trauma of the break-up toward a moment of healing.
The page representing the healing moment features Hopkins staring up the sky, where she sees three geese flying together. To her, they represent the three children who’d been raised and launched over the course of the marriage. Part of the text reads, “My three children, I was reminded, were the beautiful result of those years. I chose that moment, more than four years in the making, to unbreak my heart. You have choices too.”
It’s a powerful example of Hopkins claiming a narrative about the marriage that deeply resonated and enabled her to go forward, and Bateman drew it faithfully. The book concludes with Hopkins, accompanied by two dogs, staring off into the sunrise and offering these words for readers: “You are worthy of lasting love.”
To accomplish this kind of representation, mother and daughter agree, requires a high degree of trust as well as a willingness to closely engage, which they refer to variously as squabbling, wrangling, and “going back and forth.” The process, as compared to the early days with the first book, has grown more fluid as the women figure out the emotional center of a page together, always attending to the relationship between the word and the images. “Hallie’s gift is putting things in pictures,” says Hopkins. “She will look at this list of what happens to me, and then she’ll see images.”
In some cases, they negotiate the images by having Bateman create three or four, with Hopkins determining which one feels the most like her intended meaning. Other times, Bateman will freehand draw while discussing with Hopkins what a particular page should look like.
They didn’t initially intend to write about the break-up, but the timing of the break-up with the book tour of What to Do When I’m Gone felt like a bad joke. “I should be writing a book about what to do when you get dumped!” Hopkins recalls thinking at the time.
Instead, they did the tour and Hopkins returned to her home in northern California, while Bateman went back to Los Angeles. Hopkins busied herself with chores and writing and wondered why healing wasn’t coming along more quickly. She called Bateman and her other kids frequently with updates and book ideas. Three years passed.
Hopkins wanted to write another book with Bateman but wasn’t sure which of her ideas to pursue. “You had like 10 really good ideas, and I was excited to work on any of them,” Bateman says now to Hopkins. To help Hopkins make a decision about the next project’s direction, Bateman had an idea that seemed natural as an Angeleno: “I hired a tarot card reader.”
The women didn’t tell the reader anything about Hopkins’s circumstances. After meeting with Hopkins, the tarot card reader said, “I think you should write your memoir as a pathway to your healing.” Hopkins was astonished: “I had already started to think about the project, but she described it. I said, ‘Well, that answers it.’ ”
Hopkins doubled down on her note-writing. “I began taking notes about what worked to make me feel better and what didn’t work and what had happened and what irritated me,” she says. “Which was everything.”
Looking back, the pair agree that the project started in earnest when Hopkins was in what they call the “mid-muddle stage.” That’s the long, inchoate season of confusion and pain following the break-up. “The muddle is so long,” Hopkins laments. That reality is reflected in the structure of Dumped, which has four parts: The End (27 pages), The Muddle (50 pages), The Beginning (27 pages), and Unbroken (7 pages). The muddle is about twice the length of any other stage.
At times, Bateman wanted her mother to move faster through the process. She recalls being in a hotel room on one of their retreats and trying to force a break-through. She sketched her dad’s face on a piece of paper and stuck it on a chair. “Get mad at Dad!” she told her mother. But Hopkins wasn’t sure what to say. The exercise started with a bang and ended with a whimper. “I could have done it a year later, though,” Hopkins says as she thinks back to that exercise now.
Photograph courtesy Hallie Bateman
“I’m a speedy puppy, and Mom is a slow, wise turtle,” says Bateman of their respective speeds of work. “There’s a lot of drafting and then waiting for the next step.” She mimes panting like a puppy waiting impatiently as her mother laughed.
It was focusing on not rushing, allowing the pain to unfold at its own pace and dealing with it bit by bit that made up a lot of the book’s advice—those notes that Hopkins needed herself and provided for others. “For both of us, the ethic of it has to be true, because the truth is clean,” says Hopkins.
Recommendations in the beginning include being honest about the emotional experience of loss, such as the piece “So Let’s Talk About Crying.” The page answers three questions about crying that could make the reader both laugh and wince. First, who is saddest about the crying? Answer: children, close friends, siblings, coworkers who actually like you, and your dog. Next, who is happiest about your crying? Answer: your divorce lawyer, your cat, and tissue manufacturing execs. Finally, who is least equipped to handle your crying? Answer: the man from the moving company, your real estate agent, other Xs who dumped someone else, and passersby in the produce aisle.
Bateman’s illustrations bring these lists to life: a sympathetic dog with eyes trained on Hopkins’s face, a smiling divorce lawyer handing her a tissue, and a grimacing mover gazing uncertainly over the edge of a couch while she cries on the cushion. “All of this stuff actually happened to me,” Hopkins says as she flips through the book, each page recalling specific memories from her four years of healing that made her simultaneously shudder and laugh.
Figuring out how to communicate these moments and what tone to use throughout the book was a collaborative enterprise, and mother and daughter pored over each page together, then had an ongoing text exchange about items they might want to put in. At one point, Bateman and Hopkins were at a museum and observed a couple out in public together, but one partner was far ahead of the other, walking briskly, while the other lagged behind, carrying bags and looking put upon. Bateman and Hopkins flashed each other a look—they knew the scene would go in the book. It appears on a page about relishing singlehood alongside examples of unhappy aspects of coupledom such as trite matching shirts, arguing over chairs in IKEA, and eating in silence.
By working on What to Do When You Get Dumped, Bateman and Hopkins figured out a way to live through and process Hopkins’s grief together. “It was an honor to be part of this amazing synthesis of information,” Bateman says now.
She also feels the project brought them closer together. When asked about her favorite spreads in the new book, Bateman points to a page called “Behold the Badger.” The badger stands tall and proud, gazing at the viewer directly and accompanied by the text praising “its uniqueness: the adorable stripes, the squatty yet confident stance” and urging readers to be kind to themselves: “You would not pass judgment on a badger. Why are we so prone to do it to people? Let’s take care of ourselves, and the badgers, too, with some basic respect.”
For Bateman, the spread is “pure, uncut Suzy Hopkins: playful, loving, kind, funny, dark. I just love it, and I loved drawing it.” Hopkins smiles, adding, “I love that one, too.”
Thinking about what drew Bateman and Hopkins together as collaborators, I come back to the close relationship they’d created as mother and daughter. Bateman felt, as a child, that no topic was off-limits and that her mother provided safety, security, good sense, good food, and home. In these books, they’re extending that deep sense of security and home to readers while also being truly honest and present to each other about their deepest fears and struggles—and finding ways to laugh along the way.
Bateman and her husband, both of whom work remotely, relocated to Cincinnati from Los Angeles in spring 2023. Her husband grew up in West Chester, and they appreciated the Midwest’s affordability after years in California. Soon after, Bateman found out she was pregnant with twins. She writes directly to them in the acknowledgements in Dumped: “To my babies: This book was drawn over the span of my pregnancy, and I’ll always remember it as such a joyful and happy experience. Also, I appreciate you arriving after I completed all the artwork. Your timing is impeccable.” She also writes to her mother, “Thank you for watching your brand-new grandchildren while I write these acknowledgements in the next room.”
Hopkins also moved from California to Cincinnati, mainly to help Hopkins and her husband during the busy years of child-rearing. “Hallie couldn’t do this alone,” Hopkins says, and then she pauses and backtracks. “I mean, she could. But why would she want to?”
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