Before it would become a bestseller, before it had a title, before the first comic was drawn, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do was a project of reconstruction: an attempt to bring together generations of family stories. “I was a graduate student and took a detour from my art education training to get lost in the world of oral history,” writes Bui in the book’s preface. “I was trying to understand the forces that caused my family, in the late seventies, to flee one country and start over in another.”

Dissatisfied with the limits of oral history, Bui turned towards other genres—hunting for a way to weave the personal, political, and historical. “I was inspired by some of the big graphic memoirs like Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi,” shared Bui with The Mary Sue. “And then, I didn’t really want to write a memoir; [but] the oral history needed a protagonist to lead you through the story and I had to volunteer myself.”

The memoir opens with the birth of Bui’s son, an event that shifts the project from a historical reconstruction to a book about parents and children. Life with her new child, rife with potential and uncertainty, catalyzes a realization that family was “now something I have created—and not just something I was born into.” Thus, Bui returns to her parents’ histories: this time not just as their child, but as a parent herself.
(from https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-big-read/best-we-could-do-illustrated-memoir)

And those of you who want to hear Thi Bui speak about her book can look at this YouTube video.