Overview

The Customer is Always Wrong is the continuing saga of a young naive artist working in a restaurant of drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a scuzzy, low-rent warzone and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the sleaze-ball characters that sur- round her 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 Mimi s life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not. Told in 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 novel. She drops readers right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for the addicts and alcoholics surrounding her while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.

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9781770462823

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Reviews

Sharp and ambitious... If Pond's last book was a sitcom, The Customer is Always Wrong would be an HBO drama with a Sunday night time slot. --Jezebel The sobering wake-up call to naive nostalgia... [The Customer Is Always Wrong offers] a look at the end of a wild ride, punctuated by deeply profound moments in a time that could swallow you whole. --San Francisco Chronicle A book filled with ghosts... An Oakland that doesn't exist anymore, a culture that doesn't exist anymore, and people that don't exist anymore, in more ways than one. --Hollywood Reporter A charming, loosely autobiographical story of Pond's early years. --National Post Best of 2017 Set in late 1970s Oakland, this comedic graphic novel from Over Easy author Pond follows a waitress named Madge whose career as a comic artist finally starts to take off. --Entertainment Weekly Mimi Pond is a treasure, one we ignore at our own risk... Her latest book -- a thick, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman called The Customer Is Always Wrong -- might be her greatest work to date. It's a lengthy and detailed portrait of a young woman working at a restaurant in late-'70s Oakland and the cast of characters around her -- some of them shady, some of them lovable, and all of them compelling. Pond's hand is confident and her figure work hops balletically across the page; her facial acting is simple, but searing. --Vulture

Sharp and ambitious... If Pond's last book was a sitcom, The Customer is Always Wrong would be an HBO drama with a Sunday night time slot. --Jezebel The sobering wake-up call to naive nostalgia... [The Customer Is Always Wrong offers] a look at the end of a wild ride, punctuated by deeply profound moments in a time that could swallow you whole. --San Francisco Chronicle A book filled with ghosts... An Oakland that doesn't exist anymore, a culture that doesn't exist anymore, and people that don't exist anymore, in more ways than one. --Hollywood Reporter Set in late 1970s Oakland, this comedic graphic novel from Over Easy author Pond follows a waitress named Madge whose career as a comic artist finally starts to take off. --Entertainment Weekly Mimi Pond is a treasure, one we ignore at our own risk... Her latest book -- a thick, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman called The Customer Is Always Wrong -- might be her greatest work to date. It's a lengthy and detailed portrait of a young woman working at a restaurant in late-'70s Oakland and the cast of characters around her -- some of them shady, some of them lovable, and all of them compelling. Pond's hand is confident and her figure work hops balletically across the page; her facial acting is simple, but searing. --Vulture Set in late 1970s Oakland, this comedic graphic novel from Over Easy author Pond follows a waitress named Madge whose career as a comic artist finally starts to take off. --Entertainment Weekly Mimi Pond is a treasure, one we ignore at our own risk... Her latest book -- a thick, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman called The Customer Is Always Wrong -- might be her greatest work to date. It's a lengthy and detailed portrait of a young woman working at a restaurant in late-'70s Oakland and the cast of characters around her -- some of them shady, some of them lovable, and all of them compelling. Pond's hand is confident and her figure work hops balletically across the page; her facial acting is simple, but searing. --Vulture Immensely enjoyable. --Kirkus Starred Review The sleazeballs, drunks, and assorted weirdoes of the Imperial Cafe are the backdrop for a book that manages to make an epic out of the life of a struggling artist serving up coffee to a cast of characters both funny and deeply human. --Barnes and Noble Blog Madge is like a boho '70s Dorothy traveling through Oakland's edgy Oz: a place of drugs, sex, racial tensions, heartbreak and, sometimes, redemption. I love Mimi Pond. I love Madge's journey towards self-discovery. And I love the Imperial Cafe, which, all these years later still makes the best cheddar, green chile scrambled eggs you've ever tasted. --Peggy Orenstein, Author of Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape Madge's coming of age is hilarious, terrifying, moving, and compulsively readable. Great drawings and great writing. --Roz Chast, author of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Author Information

Mimi pond started her career as a cartoonist at the National Lampoon in the late 70s. In the years following, she wrote and illustrated five humour books and contributed regularly to dozens of national magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. In 2014, she published the first part of her coming of age memoir, Over Easy. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband the painter Wayne White. She is now close friends with Monica Lewinsky.

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