How I Tried to Be a Good Person

This graphic memoir is about obsession, gender conflict, and self-liberation, told with an honesty few cartoonists are capable of.

Lust's follow-up to her first internationally lauded graphic memoir, How I Tried to Be a Good Person, picks up directly where its predecessor left off. Revealing and powerful, Lust recounts her life as a young, enthusiastic anarchist making her way in Vienna in the 1990s - and of her love for two men: the "perfect companion" Georg, an actor twenty years her elder, and the "perfect lover," Kimata, a Nigerian man-about-town. As her relationships with the two men evolve, jealousy increasingly mounts and leads to emotional and violent outbreaks that threaten her life. Two-color illustrations throughout.

Ulli Lust, born in Vienna in 1967, is an award-winning comic artist and illustrator. The German edition of this book, published in 2025, won that year’s €25,000 German Nonfiction Prize, awarded by Germany’s publishers and booksellers association―the first time a graphic-format book was awarded the prize.

The original edition of Early Man Was a Woman, Book 2 (forthcoming from The Experiment) was awarded the 2026 Max Und Moritz Award for Best Non-fiction Comic, the most important award for graphic literature in German-speaking countries. Her graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life garnered international acclaim and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Ignatz Award. Her subsequent books include How I Tried to Be a Good Person and Voices in the Dark, based on the novel by Marcel Beyer.

She teaches drawing and comics at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.