Coco Picard

Coco Picard is a writer, cartoonist, and curator. She is the author of two graphic novels, Meowsers (forthcoming) and The Chronicles of Fortune (2017), which was nominated for a DiNKy Award. Art criticism and comics have otherwise appeared under the name Caroline Picard in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Paris Review, and Seven Stories Press, among others. She started the Green Lantern Press in 2005, received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute and was a Bookends Fellow at Stony Brook University.

All Books

Black and white illsutration of the backside of a nude woman atop a hill with two trees seemingly growing horizontally out of her. Yellow text reads "The Healing Circle, a novel by Coco Picard" with an award seal declaring the book "Winner of the Red Hen Press Women's Prose Award"

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The Healing Circle

Coco Picard

Publication Date: August 16, 2022

$17.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636280516

Description:

A mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died. Bedridden with a terminal diagnosis, memories, nurses, immoral doctors, foreign television broadcasts, and phone calls from children intrude upon her consciousness. An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is her primary companion.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The Healing Circle is a far-reaching, honest, and funny novel about dying and living, a kind of pilgrimage to wholeness through uncertainty and disorientation. Full of resonance, it asks what it means to heal, to be in pain, to be a person.”

—Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

“The Healing Circle is wry, subtle, and daring. Coco Picard has written a vivid novel about living, dying, and remembering.”

—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

News

Coco Picard Interviews a Character from THE HEALING CIRCLE In Women Writers Women’s Books

An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky sits on the ledge of a window in the Wellness Center outside of Munich, Germany in my debut novel, THE HEALING CIRCLE. The plant is ordinary, easily overlooked, particularly in this far wing of a hospital dedicated to rest and relaxation. She observes all kinds of things from this […]

Conversations Between Friends: COCO PICARD and Sue Mell in Craft

Consider the personal effects one leaves behind, the way those objects, once laid out, recall the idiosyncratic logic of a life—is there more compelling inspiration for a novel? Authors Coco Picard and Sue Mell met through the BookEnds SUNY alumni group months before their debut novels came out. They couldn’t stop talking about books and art—and the […]

THE HEALING CIRCLE author Coco Picard talks mushrooms, “The Devil Wears Prada,” and capitalism in Daily Beast essay

My Instagram feed is currently riddled with mushroom advertisements. A mushroom beverage exceeds coffee for focus and health benefits! Mushroom face serums provide youthful, plump-celled, and small-pored complexions! Another mushroom supplement rivals Xanax! To say nothing of the anti-dementia mushrooms, cancer-fighting mushrooms, gut-health mushrooms, and luxury magic mushroom retreats! In 2022, The New York Times named mushrooms the “ingredient […]

Coco Picard discusses THE HEALING CIRCLE in HenLitCentral Interview

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your published book (s).I am a writer, cartoonist, and curator. I started the Green Lantern Press, a non-profit art space and publisher in Chicago and ran it for about seventeen years. It’s a great city—the art and lit community is warm, supportive, and brilliant. A great tradition […]

Coco Picard’s THE HEALING CIRCLE included in Chicago Reader’s list of recommendations!

Hopefully you’ve been following our recent comics journalism pieces on art and artists created by Reader contributor and former Chicagoan Coco Picard (her latest, an interview with artist and professor Nick Cave, was in our August 18 issue). If you’re intrigued by Picard’s comics style, check out her debut novel The Healing Circle, a magical tale including a terminal diagnosis, motherhood, […]

THE HEALING CIRCLE author Coco Picard recommends 7 metaphysical writing exercises in Writer’s Digest

Writers are often inspired by some ghost—a lingering feeling or charge, whether attributed to one’s own inner psychological state or an honest-to-god spirit. I think of William Butler Yeats, for instance, who relied heavily on the automatic writing of his spouse, Georgie Hyde-Lees, or Gisèle Prassinos, discovered by and published alongside the surrealists at age 14. […]

Coco Picard, author of THE HEALING CIRCLE, spotlights fiction unafraid to confront death for Electric Literature

Both of my parents died when I was in my early twenties. I was still immersed in their friend group at the time, as well as close with my extended family and two siblings, so I saw a range of reactions firsthand. It was as if the deaths happened differently for each of us. I […]

THE HEALING CIRCLE author Coco Picard recommends books with plants as characters in LitHub essay

“In Learning to Live (Aprendendo a Viver), Clarice Lispector calls for ‘patience to observe the flowers, imperceptibly and slowly opening.” As plant philosopher Michael Marder points out in his essay, “Lispector and the Seeds of Time,” Lispector calls for a type of patience that would make one still enough to observe a plant’s movement: ‘Patience, tying together the […]

Coco Picard shares a playlist for her novel THE HEALING CIRCLE in largehearted boy!

“My novel, The Healing Circle, follows Ursula, whose terminal disease makes her leave family and friends in California—friends who share her penchant for New Age remedies—for a miracle cure in Germany. The book takes place in her hospital room. Sitting on the window ledge, an aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is Ursula’s main companion. The book […]

Coco Picard’s THE HEALING CIRCLE included in Hasty Book List’s books coming out in August!

In The Healing Circle, a bad new age mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died.

Reviews

LARB Reviews Coco Picard’s THE HEALING CIRCLE

HOPE, WHEN HELD past the point of reason, is liable to transform into a certain kind of absurdity. Over the course of The Healing Circle — the latest novel from writer, artist, and curator Coco Picard — a woman and her loved ones walk the narrow line between hope and delusion as she battles cancer. The Healing […]

Glowing Review of THE HEALING CIRCLE by Coco Picard from Midwest Review

A unique and inherently engaging novel about life, death, and dying, “The Healing Circle” showcases author Coco Picard’s natural flair for crafting a novel of serious substance with a flair for humor in service to the human condition.