Chartwell Manor: A Comics Memoir by Glenn Head; 2021. Hardcover. (Graphic)

No one asks for the childhood they get, and no child ever deserved to go to Chartwell Manor. For Glenn Head, his two years spent at the now-defunct Mendham, NJ, boarding school -- run by a serial abuser of young boys in the early 1970s -- left emotional scars in ways that he continues to process.

This graphic memoir -- a book almost 50 years in the making -- tells the story of that experience, and then delves with even greater detail into the reverberations of that experience in adulthood, including addiction and other self-destructive behavior. Head tells his story with unsparing honesty, depicting himself as a deeply flawed human struggling to make sense of the childhood he was given.