How a New Yorker Cartoonist Spends Her Sundays
Working from home, Liana Finck seems to get plenty of inspiration watching people from her apartment window.
Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
By Vivian Ewing
June 13, 2020
Liana Finck’s cartoons have wobbly lines, potato-headed characters with names like “blunt person,” and a deeply sympathetic contemporary anguish. “The most relatable thing,” Ms. Finck said, “is to show the thought in its original, messy form.”
A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Ms. Finck, 34, is also the author of several graphic books, including the novel, “A Bintel Brief,” and her memoir, “Passing for Human.” She is currently working on an adaptation of the book of Genesis, with “a childlike female guide.”
When the pandemic hit, Ms. Finck’s boyfriend, Scott Goodman, 36, began staying with her at her place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “We’re getting into a groove,” she said. “All change is hard for me, but it’s getting easier.” Recently, Mr. Goodman moved in for good.
THE PROCESS Usually I get up, brush my teeth, go to a cafe and work. I like a cafe that’s a walk from me. The walk is kind of part of it. But things have changed. The cafe I go to had a big bucket of Purell there and I was Purell-ing my hands and I sat on a napkin and I just felt really wrong doing it. Now I’m working from home.
Working from home. Credit...Liana Finck
CHORES Lately I’ve been cleaning my house on Sundays. I clean in such a disorganized way. I’ll be like “Oh, there’s dirt in the corner” and then I grab a wet rag and clean the dirt and then walking away from the dirt I’ll see a hair. So then I’ll clean the hair off and then I’ll realize that the toilet needs to be cleaned and it’s just all over the place.
WORK RUN After cleaning, I run in Prospect Park. I do the same loop every day. You can tell when someone else is trying to keep the six-foot rule and that’s very nice but a lot of people aren’t. I try to leave a lot of time for running because I actually email while I run. It’s like a work run.
This interview was conducted in January and updated in March, at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.
SMOKESCREEN The most stressful thing about texting or emailing while running is that people yell at you. I’m horrible: I hold my phone as if I’m in class and the teacher’s walking around and I don’t want them to see what I’m doing. As soon as I approach maybe within 20 feet of a person, I hold my arm by my side with the phone as if I wasn’t just emailing and then after I pass them, I pick the phone back up. Part of why I email is a smokescreen so people think that I’m not going to get out of their way. Sometimes I wear headphones but don’t actually listen to anything.
BUMPY NOTES I have a Nabokovian relationship with space. I love that it doesn’t ask anything from me. On my run, I pass the dog beach every day. And there are a couple interesting branches on this tree that children sit on and swing on and I really envy them. I don’t remember things well so I always write them down right away. Most of the emailing I’m doing is taking notes. I email myself notes.
FAMILY FURNITURE I’ll go home and my boyfriend is usually working at my dining room table. I just inherited my mom’s really wonderful drafting table which belonged to her neighbor when she was growing up. He heard God speak to him and moved to Israel to start a new religion. And he gave her his furniture and this is his drafting table.
I’m always afraid that my livelihood will disappear so it’s interesting to have company there now. There are some upsides to what’s going on right now but it’s very hard to see them through all the worry. I think quiet can be good for art. Quiet gives you patience.
VOYEUR The desk looks out into this amazing “Rear Window” style yard and I watch the people in it from various apartments and it’s so great. My work is mostly based on things that make me anxious, and my bliss is to watch people and not have to interact with them, so these people never make me anxious. Now, of course, everyone’s home a lot more. And they’ve all taken up smoking. It’s fascinating. I think they’re stressed. Maybe they were always smoking but I like to imagine that they all just started.
ON PANDEMIC SHOPPING I was kind of an early prepper. I started getting canned food before the big rush and before toilet paper went extinct. I’m a member of the Park Slope Food Coop. I don’t like how crowded it is. I really can’t stand it. I wear my headphones and that’s like the number one place where people would yell at you for wearing them. People scold at the Food Coop.
SCOTT STEW My boyfriend’s a vegan and I’m a person of habit. So he makes this thing called Scott Stew. I would be happy to eat Scott Stew exclusively but he likes to experiment. I played him a little bit of an Alice Waters memoir and he got inspired and we made this really amazing improvisational mushroom dish the other night.
KEY INGREDIENTS I drink a martini every night. I like my martini with olive juice and three big olives that I don’t think the Coop carries, so I get them from Key Foods. I also get diet soda. I feel like such a gross person when I go to the Key Foods because I buy like six bottles of diet soda at a time and two giant olive things.
A BIT TOO LEISURELY Dinner sometimes takes a lot of time. I’m not sure why. It kind of annoys me but it’s also kind of nice. It’s nice to be leisurely. I’m not naturally a leisurely person. Sometimes it’s too late to start work again but ideally we do work again after dinner but usually we don’t. In the perfect world, if we’re not working, we’ll watch a movie, like an old movie. We just watched “Spellbound” last week and I loved it.
