“She’s ba-AACK!” ‘Cathy’ Creator’s Debut Essay Collection Acquired by Putnam

As the creator of the ‘Cathy’ comic strip, Cathy Guisewite found her way into the hearts of readers over 40 years ago, and has been there ever since. Her deeply funny and relatable look at the life of a frazzled career woman became a cultural touchstone for women everywhere—the strips have been compiled into more than twenty books, and earned Guisewite the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award in 1992 and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the Cathy TV special in 1987.

She recently returned to the spotlight with a widely shared New York Times op-ed about the Women’s March, and now, she’s back with her signature self-deprecating wit and warmth in FIFTY THINGS THAT AREN’T MY FAULT: Essays from the Grown-Up Years, which Putnam acquired and will publish in the Spring of 2019. In this collection, Guisewite turns her uniquely wry and funny gaze to her own day-to-day life, with topics ranging from the mundane—teaching her parents to use TiVo, organizing four decades of photos, attempting to meditate—to the more profound—her struggle to find a purpose post-retirement and helping her parents downsize their lives—and her personal definitions of feminism. Humorous, warm, and poignant, FIFTY THINGS is ideal reading for mothers, daughters, and everyone who is caught somewhere in between, and on the threshold of “What Happens Next.”

In The Washington Post, Guisewite revealed the inspiration behind this collection: “People ‘talk about the ‘sandwich generation,’” the cartoonist says. “It much more feels to me like the ‘panini generation,’ where we’re squished between them – facing the heat of responsibility from both sides while ‘trying to be a loving guide,’ yet still making time to meet some life-goal deadlines and take ‘all those selfies that no longer resemble myself.’”