It was my good luck twice to benefit from Nicole Hollander’s bad luck—in 1990 when the Sun-Times dropped her comic strip, Sylvia, and in 2010 when the Tribune, having immediately picked it up 20 years earlier, dropped it as well. Sylvia’s audience was small, if passionate, and numbers prevailed over feelings.
Even so, the story of her youth is a story of her origins. Wonder Bread is a short book, lavishly illustrated, and the stories it tells are ones that—as they say—bent the twig. It’s amazing how much complexity can be conveyed in a few lines of prose and a few lines of charcoal.
From these breadcrumbs we tease out tragedy. “The little boy was with us a very short time,” Hollander told me. “He was going to be a foster child but he scratched my mother’s table underneath. And instead of talking about that, I’m talking about how I’m giving him permission to do that because I like him so much. He says, ‘Would your mother mind?’ and I get so excited I want to encourage him, and it leads to our doom.
