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Merrill Markoe's storied career in comedy has included co-creating and serving as head writer for Late Night with David Letterman (earning her three of her four Emmys and giving the world "Stupid Pet Tricks" in the bargain), TV writing stints for Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Moonlighting, and Sex and the City, a Writers Guild Award for writing and performing on HBO's Not Necessarily the News, and even an acting gig on Friends. The versatile Markoe, who recently received the prestigious the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement, has also published much-loved collections of her comic essays and three hilarious novels-and her cartoons have been featured in The New Yorker. All of this Renaissance woman's considerable talents converge in her first ever graphic memoir, WE SAW SCENERY: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe (Publication Date: October 13, 2020; $24.95), which, with hindsight and wit, transforms the comedian's real-life adolescent journals into a laugh-out-loud work of art.

"There are occupational hazards to being a writer," the grownup Markoe reflects. "In addition to the emotional mess that can come from writing about the people you love, there is the physical mess that accumulates from seeing everything as a potential topic. Usually I save things that strike me as funny, thinking maybe I'll write about them some day. At least that is the excuse I give myself for the weird stuff in the boxes of things I didn't get rid of because they make me laugh..It wasn't until the day that I decided to try and clean house that I found the little stack of childhood diaries I'd received as Christmas and birthday presents. They were lying way at the bottom of one of the biggest boxes. Each one came with a lock and key, because in the early sixties it was very important for preteen girls in suburban housing tracts to keep their dangerous secrets safe from prying enemy eyes."

Those little tin keys unlocked a trove of now funny memories of events that, admittedly, didn't always seem funny to young Merrill at the time. Rereading the diaries, Markoe says, she often felt like she was reading about a stranger. But it also spurred a narrative of a childhood during what is often perceived as a simpler time, but was nonetheless fraught with family dysfunction, the angst of puberty and, ultimately, the first steps toward honing her singularly off-kilter talent. Markoe finds the hilarity in being a girl scout or running for 8th grade treasurer or first "love," even as she awkwardly navigates a daily reality controlled by a chronically angry suburban mother and shaped by the rapid social changes of the 1960s. With deadpan retrospection, she recounts honing her unique vision of the world through humor, even when her family made it feel as if she were doing something wrong.

"Merrill Markoe got all the talent," says Nell Scovell, author of Just the Funny Parts. "WE SAW SCENERY is revealing, sad, funny, and above all, relatable. Markoe captures the experience of a young woman finding-and holding on to-her own voice. And we're all lucky she did." Mimi Pond, author of The Customer is Always Wrong, adds, "Merrill Markoe's visual and written analysis of her childhood diaries are acute, devastating, and hilarious." This is a witty, poignant, and perceptive story of a girl growing up told by the woman she became