This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son.

The second part presents a fascimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought-after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype for Maus. Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.