She thinks a lot about her first boyfriend, who left her after an abortion, and feels a little frustrated with her husband. Later in life, as a mother, she puts on weight and feels her creativity stifled by what is now a suburban life in Oak Park.

The woman sees herself as a failed artist, and part of the work follows her in her twenties. She lives on the third floor of a three-story Chicago brownstone apartment building, with a couple who constantly argue on the second floor and an older landlady on the first. The protagonist of Building Stories is an (unnamed) woman who lost part of her leg in a childhood boating accident. Ware is writing about important and also relatively mundane events in the lives of ordinary people he's writing about eating and sleeping and work and talk and relationship struggles and parenting, the stuff of any novel, and it's also about adult loneliness. I think the publication of Building Stories is one of the most important events in the history of graphic literature, an instant classic, but it is not all play, and it is not primarily a book for kids.

Why a game box, with a game board? To resuscitate, in part, the idea of reading as game, even if not exclusively for 'fun' (though it is also about that). 6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant 'book' (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and shapes of books and magazines and flyers and a children's book and a game board.

Building Stories by Chris Ware