Witty Look at Oneself and Life

Book Review

Title: My Jean Fit Well & The Ice-Cream Didn’t Melt: The Illustrated Life of a Goofy Writer

Author: Manali Desai

Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing, 2025

Pages: 170

 

Eric Berne would have found this book a sheer delight because he could find quite a few illustrations for his book, Games People Play. We all play a lot of “games” in life, Berne’s psychological framework suggests. Not for fun, but for survival, especially in a society. We are not often conscious of the games we’re playing, however. One of the examples from the book is of a person who blames their partner for restricting them: “I could have been a better writer if it weren’t for you.”

While Berne’s theory focused on social interactions, Manali Desai’s book is a look at the author herself as the subtitle informs us. Does the qualifier ‘goofy’ refer to the author herself or to any writer who didn’t hit a home run (like me too)? Desai is modest enough to suggest in the Dedication that she is the “talented (writer) wife” yet to be recognised by her husband.

“Dear Husband,” the Dedication reads, “You refuse to read my books. I make you the main character (okay, it’s a supporting one) in this one. Will that trick finally work?” And we know that the book is not to be taken literally in spite of all the self-effacing humour in it. The book is about the games we all play in our personal lives even if we aren’t writers.

Reviewing a book of this nature is difficult because its genre is not readily apparent. It is many things at once: a visual diary of everyday absurdities, a collection of observational vignettes, and a minimalist cartoon essay on life. Each page is a comic panel that offers a tickling insight into human life and relationships. See the example below.

Books like this one thrive on compression, not elaboration. What recommends this book to a potential reader is that each frame earns its page. The humour tickles, the insight into life hits home, and the humility of the author is ingenuous. Though the individual panels of the 150+ in the book are not sequentially related to each other, the author’s self – which is present in every one of them more like a feeling than a physical presence – binds them together cohesively. Desai’s gift is that she effortlessly overcomes the danger that a book of this type can run into: monotony. The humour that delights us in isolation doesn’t dull through repetition. There is something new waiting to hit us on the next page.

The ultimate suggestion of the book is that happiness is not as elusive as many people think. We can learn to discover happiness in simple things such as a sunset or a rainbow, or “Laughing (even at my own jokes) without worrying about judgments.” There is much happiness to be discovered in life in spite of the ineluctable domestic absurdities, loneliness, routine, social pretences, and failures. If you care to take a deeper look at Desai’s panels, you will discover a quiet anthropology of modern life emerging from the apparent throwaway humour.

The panels are AI-generated and hence the images are not all entirely consistent. Secondly, the text in the bubbles is a bit small occasionally straining your eyes. This problem could have been easily solved by giving the book a landscape format. These are insignificant limitations, however.

The book is a new step in the young world of Instagram-era visual humour. Young readers who love that kind of witty insights into life will love this book.

PS. I received a copy of the book from the author herself as a prize for a blogging activity I had engaged with recently.