I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This: A Graphic Memoir

Praise

With this book, Eugene Yelchin joins the community of author-artists who have dared to examine their troubling pasts with honesty, insight, and cleansing humor. Yelchin’s true story—as dark and satirical as a tale by Gogol or a Bulgakov novel—is matched by his art: strong black-and-white line drawings against washes of pervasive gray, as gray as the wintery steppes, as gray as Soviet Russia, which he depicts with uneasy familiarity. His characters speak the silent language that only an illustrator with the instincts of a fine actor can bring to the page. Their gestures and facial expressions tell much more than their words. Yelchin’s book is as much a storyboard for a film as it is a graphic memoir, precisely envisioned and carefully crafted to bring the reader directly into the author’s experience.
—David Small, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist Stitches: A Memoir

Yelchin’s bold and unblinking memoir explores the moment when the typical longings of youth everywhere—to create, to express yourself, to fall in love—slam into the brutal realities of the Soviet state. Timely, poignant, and unsettling—a remarkable life rendered in stark black and white by an artist unafraid to explore the gray uncertainties of where love stops and self-preservation begins.
—M. T. Anderson, author of National Book Award winner and Michael L. Printz Honor Book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

This book—this book! By turns heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, Eugene Yelchin’s eloquent memoir both a cautionary tale about the sacrifices demanded by a government that lies, denies, conceals, and coerces its citizens into compliance and a poignant love letter to his past. Its resonance is inescapable. So is its beauty.
—Candace Fleming, author of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner The Family Romanov