Chartwell Manor

New in paperback: alternative cartoonist Glenn Head’s harrowing graphic memoir is about years of sexual and emotional abuse suffered at a boarding school during his adolescence and the resultant trauma that took him almost 50 years to process before being able to tell his story publicly.

No one asks for the childhood they get, and no child ever deserves to go to Chartwell Manor. For Glenn Head, his two years spent at the now-defunct Mendham, NJ, boarding school run by a serial sexual and emotional 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 that experiences reverberations 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 his childhood. Now in paperback.