PETALUMA --

Copperfield’s Books welcomes local author Julia Wertz to Petaluma in celebration of her new memoir - Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story.

Celebrated local comic Donna Almendrala will begin the event with a 15 minute opener. 

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

In her keenly observed graphic memoir, Impossible People, celebrated cartoonist Julia Wertz chronicles her haphazard attempts at sobriety and the relentlessly challenging, surprisingly funny, and occasionally absurd cycle of addiction and recovery.

Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she's just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser told but more common story: That the road to recover is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.

Author: Julia Wertz is a professional cartoonist, amateur historian, and part-time urban explorer. Her books include The Fart Party, Museum of Mistakes, Drinking at the Movies, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories, and Tenements, Towers, & Trash: An Unconventional, Illustrated History of New York City. She does monthly comics and doodles for the New Yorker and the New York Times. After leaving New York City, she settled down in Northern California with Oliver (yes, that Oliver) and their son, Felix.

Donna Almendrala is a cartoonist and graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies Class of 2012. She received her BS from the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before earning an MFA at CCS. In 2013, she started her dream job in Santa Rosa, California as a studio artist and steward of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. She served as Art Director for three years before being named VP Content in 2021. She has contributed to Simon & Schuster's Peanuts comic books, the 2018 Eisner Winner Celebrating Peanuts, and the Emmy-award winning documentary Who Are You, Charlie Brown? She continues to create her own comics which have appeared in local publications such as Vermont Seven Days, Bay Nature and other small press anthologies. She is currently working on her next graphic novel about adopting her dog Max in Becoming a Dog Person.