The Love Is… comic strip is as old as I am. Creator Kim Casali began drawing the cartoons as love notes to her then-boyfriend Roberto. She began publishing them in 1960, the year I was born. They began appearing in newspapers daily when I was 10 years old, and my mom loved them. She cut her favorites out of the newspaper as if she were clipping coupons and pinned them onto the refrigerator or taped them to her bedroom mirror.
Seeing the Love Is… comics in the Los Angeles Times each morning is one of my favorite parts of my day. They always make me smile, and when I see them, I picture my mom in the living room of our house on Madeira Circle in Salinas, California, sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee, the newpaper, and a pair of scissors. Then the memories multiply, as memories do: I see my then 4-year-old son Tim standing on the fireplace hearth in that same house singing, “Donuts make my brown eyes blue.” Then I remember him telling corny jokes with nonsensical punch lines and going out the front door to play with his imaginary friend Skeebort, who came from Hawaii to live with us. I remember him reading his first word, “up,” in the newspaper—he recognized it from one of the books I used to read to him, Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. I remember him falling in love with a comic strip of his very own when he was about 10 years old, Calvin and Hobbes.
My son is grown now, with two children of his own. Some memories are gone, but some are as vivid as yesterday. It’s funny the tiny moments we remember. They are seemingly insignificant, but some part of us knows how significant they really are and stores them away. And it’s fascinating the way memories string together like that—eventually, we reach a point where we’re thinking of something completely unrelated to the thing that first triggered the string of memories, and we can’t remember how we even got there.
I remind the writers I work with of this often—this is how memories are triggered and how they unfold organically in the human brain. This is how a memory can come up for a character in a story, too—organically versus in a contrived flashback.
Kim Casali married Roberto in 1971. The couple had two children, both boys. When Roberto was diagnosed with cancer in 1975, Bill Asprey took over creating the cartoons for Casali so she could be with her husband. Sixteen months after Roberto’s death in 1976, Casali gave birth to the couple’s third son via artificial insemination with his stored frozen sperm, fulfilling their wish to add another child to their family. It was one of the first such cases, influenced legal cases regarding rights of inheritance, and created some controversy, but most people supported her. Casali never remarried. She passed in 1997, and Asprey continues to create the cartoons to this day.
My mom passed in 1995. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss her. I know my life has been less full than it would have been had she lived, and she didn’t get nearly the time in this sweet life that she deserved. But the Love Is… cartoons keep coming. These cartoons are just one of the ways my mom continues to live in my memory each and every day.
Love is … remembering.
XOXO
Leanne
WEEKLY ROUND-UP
Monday Blog Post: The Perks of Being a Writer: Counting all the yesses in a career filled with noes.
My California: Woodstock Comes Home to Roost: The time Peanuts cartoonist and fellow Californian Charles M. Schulz helped me decorate my bedroom.
Virtual Office Hours #11: To Outline or Not to Outline. Note: This post is a bonus I’m offering to paid subscribers, including the writers in my Fall Into Your First Draft program.
SOME THINGS FOR READERS
Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump
(Sunil Iyengar for the National Endowment for the Arts)
Hachette Book Group Launches “Raising Readers” Initiative
(David Shelley, CEO Hachette UK and Hachette Book Group)
The Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2024: The Shortlists
(Crime Fiction Lover)
Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist Announced
(New Literary Project)
Nero Book Awards 2024 Shortlists Announced
(Nero Book Awards)
Electric Lit’s Best Short Story Collections of 2024
(Electric Literature)
SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS
Are Memoirs “Impossible to Sell”? Only If Narrowly Defined
(Allison K. Williams for The Brevity Blog)
In Defense of Giving Up
(Stacey May Fowles for Jane Friedman)
Kristopher Jansma on What Writers Can Learn from the Failures and Rejections of Famous Authors
(Seth Katz interviews Kristopher Jansma for Electric Literature)
Create Compelling Suspense and Tension No Matter What’s Happening in Your Story
(Tiffany Yates Martin for Jane Friedman)
SOME THINGS TO MAKE YOU SMILE
Finally, a Book That Cannot Be Banned
(Xu Mason for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)
It’s OK to spend hundreds of hours playing ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.’ Here’s why.
Note: This article is 18 months old, but the game is on holiday sale at lots of place, is touted for promoting mental health, and may be just what some of us need during the winter season.
(Barbara VanDenburgh for USA Today)
7 QUOTES (a mini course on being a woman in 2025)
“A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.”
—Doris Lessing
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
—Alice Walker
“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
—Marilyn Monroe
“Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’”
—Clare Boothe Luce
“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”
—bell hooks
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
—Mary Shelley
“We’ve got a generation now who were born with semi-equality. They don’t know how it was before, so they think, ‘This isn’t too bad. We’re working. We have our attaché cases and our three-piece suits.’ I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don’t realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.”
—Erma Bombeck, circa 1982, after the Equal Rights Amendment failed
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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Way to get my eyes to mist up so early in the morning. Lovely memory.
I love this piece about Love is... I had totally forgotten about that comic and didn't know it was still running. It brought up warm feelings, thank you.