Mimi Pond

A young woman's art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism The Customer is Always Wrong is the saga of a young naive artist named Madge working in a restaurant of charming drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a cheap and quirky haven for eccentrics, and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the fascinating sleazeball characters that surround young Madge into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Madge's life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not. Employing the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond's storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic, standalone graphic novel. Madge is right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for her adopted greasy-spoon family while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.

A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the 1970s Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story. After getting denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret Pond finds salvation from the straight-laced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first, she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles and then slowly realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions. Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California – with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex and drug use – and bildungsroman of a young woman from naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout to self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond’s chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.