A Grant Helps Patrick Allaby Create a Graphic Novel About Consumerism

The Life I Want, a new auto-fictional graphic novel by Patrick Allaby, will explore the author’s fraught relationship with consumerism, including his attempts to curtail his own obsessive shopping habits.

The power of fiction to discern the truth

Patrick Allaby is an artist and writer from Fredericton who describes himself as a compulsive storyteller. His upcoming book, The Life I Want, will be structured as an epistolary graphic novel, consisting mainly of diary entries he wrote about his losing battle with shopping, consumerism and similar topics. Allaby illustrates his own books. His previous title, Martin Peters, explored the relationship between storytelling and lying.

Sustainability versus shopping

Allaby says the book will focus on how his own habits as a consumer defy his efforts to make a life as an artist and live sustainably. The book is an effort to reconcile these differences. The Life I Want also offers Allaby an artistic challenge: instead of relying on his usual tools—markers, pens and pencils—he is drawing and building images with brush and ink.