Gerda stands at the window of her nursing home, looking up at the stars. A simple question has been haunting her for years, but until now she’s managed to avoid it: has her life been a happy one?


As Gerda negotiates the degradations of old age and the indignity of being cared for by strangers, the past begins to seep into the present. Memories sweep over her. She remembers her life as a bespectacled schoolgirl, bullied for being smart. She remembers her ambition to enter the closed and overwhelmingly male field of astrophysics. And she remembers, most powerfully, that one summer – the summer of her life – during which she would be forced to make the most difficult decision of all: between her career and the love of her life.


The Summer of Her Life is a poetic, touching and profound graphic novel that grapples with questions that are too often left unasked. What is it like to spend your twilight years in a home? How do you know whether you’ve made the right choices? And what does it mean, in the end, to be happy?

Visual artist(s): Barbara Yelin