“… to tell the truth they must create an artifice.” We Discuss Memoirs, Comics, and I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This with Eugene Yelchin

This past weekend I had the great delight in partaking in a Tomi Ungerer Symposium at The Rabbit hOle in Kansas City. If you’re unfamiliar with the location, it’s essentially the world’s first interactive picture book museum (and a lot more hands on than you’ll usually find with similar institutions). While tooling about its bookstore I happened to notice the book The Genius Under the Table prominently displayed in the middle grade fiction area. It instantly sent me back. When that book was first released it was something of a revelation. Part fiction, part memoir, and all interesting. I’d never really seen anything like it.

Now I have seen something like it. And it’s a YA graphic memoir.

I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This picks up where The Genius left off. Eugene is still our focus, and he’s still in Russia (though no word on whether or not he’s still wearing Baryshnikov’s old blue jeans) but now he’s a long-haired, jaded teenager. A long-haired, jaded teenager… in love.

Look, here’s the plot synopsis:

“No longer the creative little boy under his grandmother’s table, Yevgeny is now a young adult, pursuing his artistic dreams under the constant threat of the KGB’s stranglehold on Russia’s creative scene. When a chance encounter with an American woman opens him up to a world of romance and possibility, Yevgeny believes he has found his path to the future—and freedom overseas. But the threat of being drafted into the military and sent to fight in Afghanistan changes everything in a terrible instant, and he takes drastic measures to decide his fate, leading to unthinkable consequences in a mental hospital. With bold art bringing a vivid reality to life, National Book Award Finalist and Newbery Honoree Eugene Yelchin’s sequel to the acclaimed memoir The Genius Under the Table returns to Yevgeny’s saga, balancing the terror and oppression of Soviet Russia with the author’s signature charm and dark wit. I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This shines a stark spotlight on history while offering a poignant, nuanced, and powerfully resonant look at growing up in—and ultimately leaving—Cold War Russia in the early 1980s.”

If you know anything about me then you know that I don’t touch YA materials on this blog. But how often does a middle grade novel yield a YA comic? Plus, it’s Eugene Yelchin. I would be a fool not to talk to him in some capacity:

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Betsy Bird: Eugene! By all appearances you have a book out! And, as you once told me, “It is probably the best book I’ve done so far and the most important given the state of our State”. Having just finished it myself, I am forced to agree. It’s the exceedingly rare case of a middle grade prose memoir (and Sydney Taylor Award nominee) being followed by a YA graphic novel memoir. Let’s back everything up to the beginning then. Where did this book come from, precisely, and why is it a graphic novel and not, say, a work of prose fiction/nonfiction?

Eugene Yelchin: Thank you, Betsy, for speaking to me about I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This.

This is how the book came about. Some years ago, I mentioned to my therapist that when I describe this or that episode of my Russian childhood in the company of friends or strangers, the uncomfortable pause always follows. What does it mean, doctor?

“Eugene,” the therapist answered, “if you think your childhood was normal . . . it wasn’t.”

I relayed his answer to my agent and friend, Steven Malk, who suggested that I write a book about my childhood behind the Iron Curtain. A year later, Steven sent my manuscript to a number of editors, and I received a corresponding number of very nice letters telling me why their publishing houses would be the perfect places to publish my story. One of the letters was from the amazing Elizabeth Bicknell at Candlewick Press. There was no doubt in my mind that she was the perfect editor for what would become The Genius Under the Table. The last chapter of my manuscript briefly described my departure from the USSR. “No, no, no,” Elizabeth objected. “I want a whole new book about that.” We published The Genius, and a year later, I handed her the manuscript for the second book. Elizabeth rejected it. Given the gravity of the subject matter and my age at the departure, what I wrote was hardly a book for young readers. She suggested the graphic novel format for teens. I could create the world without much explaining; show, not tell; and get away with darker stuff (and those were the darkest of my Russian years) by focusing on the romance with Libby (not her real name), who — and it’s true — saved my life.

BB: That was a smart move on Liz’s part, since this book works exceedingly well in its current format. Of course, you’ve a double difficulty with this title. On the one hand you have to take your own life and sculpt it into a narrative that manages to not only make sense but to serve our storytelling demands. On top of that, you have to clean it up enough to make it understandable to younger readers. How do you tackle these dual complications? 

Eugene: Between the two years it took me to complete The Genius Under the Table and the four years of working on I Wish I Didn’t, etc., I have learned a great deal not only about writing a memoir but more importantly, about myself. The purpose of any memoir is to make sense of the past. It is, by definition, an explanatory narrative. Written for the younger readership it also must be dramatically engaging. In other words, I was telling a dramatic story in which I was a protagonist. As a result, everything I apply to a piece of fiction, I was applying to a piece of nonfiction. The characters and the events are real, but the orchestration of the events on the page is subjected to a causal progression; one event causes the next event to happen. In each event, your expectation is subverted, the outcome is surprising, but it moves the protagonist a little closer to self-discovery. The mode of operation in writing about one’s past is searching for the hidden patterns. They are there in the first place but only the hindsight examination avails them to you. And if you’re brutally honest with yourself — the one and only requirement for a memoir author —the pattern you’ve discovered becomes the engine of your story. It moves your story toward the recognition of who you really are. As far as making it understandable to younger readers, I am a stingy writer. I only provide enough exposition for the reader to turn the page. I dramatize, yes, but I do not explain.

BB: Not to be pedantic, but that quality (only providing enough exposition for the reader to turn a page) is what makes you an ideal candidate for penning graphic novels. Now let’s talk a little bit about that process (doing a straight graphic novel). Many of your books have contained graphic novel elements in their inseams. Insofar as I can determine, this is your first gn proper, yes? Interestingly, while the story focuses on your artistic influences, comics don’t come up. How did you discover comics at all? 

Eugene: I still don’t know comics. I understand (and teach) the sequential storytelling to film students in the form of storyboards, so in the case of I Wish I Didn’t, I was imagining my scenes, as if I were to film them. When that was done, I added speech balloons. I’ve always had problems enjoying the comics because of my inability to multitask. I either read the text or I look at the pictures. To do both at the same time makes me feel guilty, as if I am not giving appropriate attention to either the writer or the artist.

BB: As someone who grew up reading comics practically from birth I find this methodology to be understandably fascinating. In writing your own story, what did you find you were able to keep and what did you have to lose along the way? 

Eugene: This is a very interesting question, Betsy, because it touches upon telling the truth in art. Artmaking is highly selective. Out of many possibilities of how a piece of art can be created, artists choose those which best elucidate the meaning of what they are trying to convey. The fact that they are making choices proves that to tell the truth they must create an artifice. It is as true of a memoir as of news reporting, documentary filmmaking, informational writing, etcetera. Choices are made as to what to include and what to exclude. I did not change the events as far they occurred, but I chose only those that would guide the reader to experience intellectually, emotionally, sometimes even physically, what I had experienced while those events were in progress.

BB: This is a bit of an odd question, since it’s only tangentially related to this book and its predecessor, THE GENIUS UNDER THE TABLE. Even so, I’m curious. While working at New York Public Library I was privy to seeing some of the incredible Russian picture book art of the late 1920s in the collection. Yet I’ve no sense of what you yourself were aware of from a literary perspective growing up in Russia. In this book the primary influence over you is WAR AND PEACE, but what else did you read growing up? 

Eugene: Yes, there was a limited number of picture books made by the authors and illustrators who had survived Stalinist purges available in some libraries. By Vladimir Lebedev, for example, a brilliant illustrator. All art students knew his work very well. But overall, by the late 1920s, the Russian-Soviet avantgarde was replaced by the officially sponsored socialist realism, and all the traces of that extraordinary movement were made to disappear. It is a tragedy of the Russian art and literature that from the late 1920s to the late 1980s, we did not even know the names of those remarkable artists, writers, and poets. I grew up reading mostly what my father had in his library — 19 century Russian classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, etc.), and the translations of foreign classics (Dickens, Dumas, Verne, Twain, Cooper, etc.) But by the mid 1970s, some works of the giants of the Russian 20^th century literature (Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, etc.) began to appear in the underground circles. Those banned works were published abroad and smuggled to the USSR. To be caught copying, even reading them would almost certainly guarantee a criminal charge. I’m proud to say that I have managed to avoid being caught.

BB: I read this book as an advanced reading copy, then immediately went out to find a final version as well. You end the book leaving me with further questions about your life. THE GENIUS UNDER THE TABLE was for kids. This is for teens. Is there any chance of you continuing the story for adults? 

Eugene: Oh, I don’t know. Next installment could only be my blundering efforts to infiltrate the American culture, but Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat and the Wild and Crazy Guys of the SNL had done it wonderfully already.

BB: Good answer, honestly. Finally, what else are you working on these days? What’s next for you? 

Eugene: Next year, I will have a new book published by Candlewick Press, Girl Made of Iron, a middle grade novel set in the Jewish shtetls of Ukraine where everyone in my family except my brother and myself were born. It’s a funny book but a sad one too. I’m working on the art for it now. And I’m hoping to have another manuscript completed next year, also middle grade, which focuses on the children of the Russo-Ukrainian war, which will be in its fourth year this coming February. It is a very hard subject to work on, but a necessary one for me to make a book about.

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And now, a special treat. Before this interview Eugene wrote to me, saying, “I had my book launch at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in LA and made a short film for the event from the illustrations in the book and some documentary footage. The film has music and sound effects, but the characters’ voices were delivered live in front of the audience by six actors (one of them was my youngest, Ezra, who is now a freshman at Berkeley).”

Today, we’ve a chance to premiere this video. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have:

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I’d like to thank Eugene today for not only taking the time to talk to me about his book, but for showing us that incredible film as well. I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This is most certainly out in bookstores and libraries now, with stars from Kirkus, Booklist, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and the Horn Book. Like I say, I don’t read much YA, but when I do, I want it to be extraordinary. This book fits the bill.

Happy reading!

Filed under: Best Books of 2025, Interviews