“I felt like when Trump was elected, we were all just living through history. I still feel like that. We’re done with even being funny about it. Everyone is just exhausted.”

Work about the experience of motherhood:
Has to do with sex
Requires your own space
Needs to be elevated to high art

About a decade ago, I picked up a small, rectangular-shaped book of comics with a dayglo reddish-and-yellow cover, titled Girl Stories. Cartoonist Lauren Weinstein’s second book, published in 2003, includes such classic titles as “Am I fat?” and “How to really get a boyfriend.” Like much of her work, the book pushes boundaries, between humor and absurdity, between autobiography and cultural and political commentary. The cartooning style itself was something of a revelation: how could something, all at once, look so carefully crafted but also so spontaneous and free? How could a work that appears emphatically earnest also make me feel like a joke was being played, at least a little bit, on me, and on all of its readers?

I’ve since had the opportunity to engage with the wide range of Weinstein’s oeuvre, from her “Inside Vineyland” cartoons—an early strip she did for Seattle’s The Stranger—to her more recent sometimes-political, sometimes-autobiographical, often-absurdist strip for the now-departed Village Voice. (I should also divulge: Weinstein designed and drew the cover for my first book, which includes a study of her early work.) Over the last nine or so years, Weinstein has been publishing comics about her experiences of being a mother and an artist for venues that include Nautilus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Her most recent piece, a 32-page comic for Frontier, titled “Mother’s Walk” and recounting in unflinching, gorgeous detail the experience of being pregnant with, and birthing, her second child, has fittingly made it onto a number of “best of” comics lists for 2018.

Several days into the new year, I had breakfast with Weinstein in the posh second-floor café of the Freehand Hotel, just a few blocks from the School of Visual Arts, where she sometimes teaches. While a waiter fluttered around us, the tape recorder apparently making him nervous, we discussed a number of her most recent ventures. Weinstein’s easy laughter peppered our conversation.

—Tahneer Oksman

I. “I feel this too.”

THE BELIEVER: I want to start by asking about your strip in The Village Voice, which you were publishing almost every week from the end of 2016 to early 2018. How did you get involved in this gig? And where does the “normel person” tag line...