68 pages • 2 hours read
Jarrett KrosoczkaHey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Parenthood and Family
Jarrett spends most of this book struggling with how to make sense of his family relationships. His mother can’t be relied on, and his father seems at first to want nothing to do with him. Even the stable adults in his life, his grandparents, aren’t always the easiest people to trust: Joe and Shirley fight a lot, and Shirley’s temper is sometimes frightening.
Jarrett shows his own perspective of what parenthood means as it evolves over the course of the book. As a little kid, he just wants his mom back; as a middle schooler, he stops trusting her and has no desire to ever know his father; as a high schooler, he confronts Leslie with his anger and starts a tentative relationship with Richard. All the while, he’s also learning to appreciate Joe and Shirley for acting as his real parents: If in middle school he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t have a normal-looking family, by the end of the book he’s calling his grandparents mom and dad, saying: “I had two incredible parents right there before me the entire time. They were just a generation removed” (297).
Parenthood, Hey, Kiddo argues, is about behavior, not blood. While Jarrett maintains some kind of connection with his biological mother and father, they aren’t the people he thinks of as parents. More than anything, Krosoczka suggests, parenting is about being there in a loving, stable way. This means that it’s an honorific title: To be a parent in this sense is an accomplishment.
Comics and Art-making
In an important series of pages, Krosoczka writes, “When I was a kid, I’d draw to get attention from my family. In junior high, I drew to impress my friends. But now that I am in my teens, I fill sketchbooks just to deal with life. To survive” (214-16). This is a clear summary of the role of art in Hey, Kiddo.
To Krosoczka, art-making—especially the kind that helps you survive—seems to be about moving from pleasing other people to discovering what’s true and real for you. This is a complex lesson for the young Jarrett to learn: One important art teacher urges him to ignore formulaic superhero drawing lessons and move toward his own style, and later another tells him that he needs to submit to learning the basics of realistic form and perspective in order to be a good cartoonist. In the end, it takes a combination of individuality, humility, and sheer love of the art for Krosoczka to become the cartoonist (and the person) he wants to be.
Jarrett subtly demonstrates the idea that art isn’t about pleasing people with the existence of this book itself. Krosoczka’s portrayal of his family is sympathetic, but it’s also very honest; one can imagine that his grandparents, who grew up in the stoical Depression era, might not have loved having the stories of their bad behavior (as well as their good) published for the world to read. However, art-making requires a commitment to the truth in all its complexity.
Krosoczka’s decision to devote his life to making comics therefore stands in opposition to his family’s choices around drugs. Alcohol and heroin can help you to feel like you’re escaping from your problems, but they become problems of their own. Making art means that you face problems square on, and transform them.
Growing Up
Krosoczka chooses to start and end his story at the same part of his life. He’s a teenager in both the first and the last chapters of the book. There’s a reason for this: It’s as a teenager that he feels he first began to really understand his relationship with his family and to be an artist.
The organization of this book means that the reader gets to check in on the continuing themes of art and family (as explored above) at several different eras of Krosoczka’s life. He makes art as a little kid, a middle schooler, and a teenager; the changing experience of his family at all these ages, too. Each iteration of Jarrett deals with these experiences in a different way, and learns something the previous Jarrett couldn’t know.
Krosoczka’s interest in the development of his thoughts and feelings around these important subjects suggests that he sees self-examination as a critical part of being a responsible grown-up and artist. To really grow up, and not get stuck in the same old pattern, one has to know where one has come from, and let one’s mind change. When the book ends with Jarrett on the cusp of adulthood, about to go off to college, it shows a Jarrett on his way to becoming the author of this memoir.
