Advance Preview: ‘How To Make Life Better When It Feels Like It’s Getting Worse’ By Simone Lia, Plus A Loving Look Back At Fluffy

Advance word of Simone Lia‘s new book, How To Make Life Better When It Feels Like It’s Getting Worse. Publishing in September, this could easily be one of my books of the year…

Here’s what it’s all about…

‘Fluffy Pulcino is nearly all grown up. Nearly. But life in your early twenties can be complicated enough without the added quirk of being a bunny trying to function in a human world.

‘No longer in denial about who he is, Fluffy sets out on the difficult task of finding his place in the world. His attempts at writing a self-help book lead him to reflect on a life plagued by failure – and by having to dodge people who just want to pick him up and stroke his ears. Fluffy’s coming of age is drawn with a heartbreaking veracity that hits its mark when the overtly sweet and fantastical meets with an unswerving ability to voice our darker, more painful truths.

‘How to Make Life Better When It Feels Like it’s Getting Worse is a buoyant return to a beloved character. Through the unlikely avatar of a small, fluffy bunny and gloriously irreverent storytelling, Simone Lia shows what it means to grow into adulthood, find purpose and live in this world.’

How To Make Life Better is Lia’s follow-up — nearly two decades in the making — to Fluffy, initially published in four comics from 2003-2005 and collected by Jonathan Cape in 2007. That was one of my books of that year, a quite beautiful thing, and I’ve no doubt that How To Make Life Better will be up there for 2025.

Here’s how Lia talks about the genesis of Fluffy and what made her write this follow-up…

‘In the early 2000s, I discovered a love for reading and making comics. One of my characters was Fluffy, a small rabbit who lived in a human world. I wanted to write a long-form story about Fluffy and his dad, and I set about doing this by self-publishing the story in four parts under Cabanon Press. Cabanon Press was an imprint that Tom Gauld and I set up for publishing our comics. I had no idea how to write and structure a long story and relied on intuition and creating new storytelling devices as I went along. In some ways, knowing little about graphic novels gave me a freedom to create and make mistakes. What pulled me along was a curiosity about Fluffy and his dad’s relationship. Writing and drawing the story helped me to investigate it, and people of different ages seemed to resonate with the characters in the book.

‘Years later, I began wondering what would happen to Fluffy as he grew up. I thought about the struggles he’d have as he became more aware of the complexities of who really was. Jonathan Cape were keen for a sequel, and slowly, slowly a self-help book/graphic memoir was created and written from Fluffy’s point of view. Publication is almost 20 years after Jonathan Cape originally published the four chapters of Fluffy as one book. A lot has changed in my approach to storytelling, but what remains is the curiosity of who Fluffy is and his relationship to others and also a way of feeling out the story intuitively, page by page’

Now, remember I told you that How To Make Life Better is a sequel to Lia’s first book, Fluffy, and assuming that many of you won’t have seen, and fallen in love with, Fluffy, I reckon I’ll tell you a little bit more about that and show you pages from that as a way of giving you some idea of the joy and beauty, the despair and love that you’ll experience with its follow-up. So, here’s what I wrote back in 2007 about Fluffy…

‘Now, for a book featuring a very cute talking bunny, Fluffy is an almost unbearably sad tale. At the heart of this desperate sadness is Fluffy, a talking baby rabbit who genuinely believes that a man called Michael Pulcino is his daddy. And although Michael knows he must tell this poor deluded little rabbit the truth, so many things seem to keep getting in the way.

‘Because, as troubled and deluded Fluffy is, it’s nothing compared to the mess that Michael is in. He’s a seething mass of anxiety, despair and stress, desperate for closeness, yet struggling with the demands placed upon him from Fluffy and the unwanted attention of Fluffy’s nursery school teacher. Michael has a feeling that life is just too much for him to cope with, that there’s too much weighing down upon him, too many things demanding his time, and it’s heartbreaking to see Fluffy’s love for him causing him such pain.

‘It’s testament to Lia’s writing and gorgeous artwork that we, the reader, never question the logic of a baby talking rabbit desperate for love from his daddy. It’s an even greater achievement to make the reader care so much about the characters. The sense of longing and dependency from Fluffy, the sense of anxiety, stress and desperation from Michael are all expertly realised in Lia’s wonderful story.

‘But in the end, as if she realised that the despair was becoming a little too much for this funny animal story, Lia gives us salvation in Michael’s acceptance of his lot in life and a pledge to find beauty in the moment. The most wonderful scene occurs late in the story as Michael’s brain turns his thoughts from “my life is a mess” to “everything is beautiful”. Michael leans back and simply realises that it’s all worthwhile, that there is no reason to worry, no reason to be stressed and every reason to live his life and look after the one thing that has always loved him – Fluffy.

‘Fluffy is an absolute joy of a graphic novel, full of unanswerable questions about life, love, responsibility and reality. Simone Lia’s art matched the emotional power of the story with a simplified style, cartoonish, fanciful yet capable of conveying intense emotional range in a few lines. Fluffy is achingly sad in parts yet manages to end in a way that fills even our cold, grown-up hearts with joy. It’s a perfect book.’

Yep, I loved it back in 2007 and I still love it now. It’s heartbreakingly sad at times, incredibly, beautifully, brings tears rolling down your face joyous at others. I really hope – and don’t doubt – that How To Make Life Better will be just as an emotional rollercoaster and just as magnificent a read.