Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family

In Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family, cartoonist and National Book Award finalist Mariana R. Johnson turns her incisive, tender gaze inward, chronicling her childhood as the daughter of an immigrant family in a single, standalone graphic memoir. Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, this one-issue comic explores the cacophony of a loud, loving, and complicated household, where cultural clashes, generational expectations, and the struggle for personal identity play out in vivid, emotionally resonant panels. Johnson’s sharp, expressive artwork and unflinching honesty make this a quietly powerful addition to the canon of immigrant narratives in comics—a compact, heartfelt snapshot of growing up caught between two worlds.