Amy Kurzweil’s second graphic memoir traces Amy’s relationships with her father and paternal grandfather, both of whom cast long shadows. Her father, Ray, is a futurist and transhumanist who works on artificial intelligence, especially related to recreating the voices/personalities of those who have died. Her grandfather, Fred, was a pianist and conductor who had to flee the Nazis in the 1930s. However, Kurzweil’s work is interested in larger questions than her relationships; those are merely the means by which she asks those questions, the most central of which comes in a brief prologue: “What’s the meaning of life?”

Ray Kurzweil has spent much of his life as an inventor, with most of those focusing on what we would now call AI. Relatedly, he keeps a wide variety of documents, partly because he might be able to use them to recreate people, especially his father, Fred, after their death. His belief is that he can feed Fred’s writings into an algorithm that will then be able to reproduce his voice and personality when somebody enters a question. Ray didn’t have a close relationship with his father, whose work seemed to drive him more than anything else, so readers can see how Ray is trying to remedy that problem, even after his father’s death.

Ray enlists Amy to help her in this process, as she goes to storage units to dig through boxes of documents, hoping to find something more personal than newspaper clippings about Fred’s performances or the multitudes of application letters he wrote to find a secure teaching position. Amy even enlists the help of her aunt in trying to decipher Fred’s handwriting on the few journals she is able to find. During this process, something begins to happen to Amy, though, as she begins to learn more about her grandfather. She is looking at scans of his journal, and she thinks, “I used to think that I would recognize my grandfather in his artifacts, as if he were a room I once lived in or a part of myself. But I never knew Fred. So the words of his life are a foreign language to me. Until, eventually, they aren’t.” She can now, almost instantaneously, read Fred’s handwriting, which she feels is a step closer to understanding him as a person.

Still, most of the documents are more official than personal, so her understanding of him is limited. Kurzweil uses the documents and other types of media in her art throughout the book, recreating them and surrounding herself with them. At times, the media and communication she consumes even seem to paralyze Amy. A parallel plot of the book is Amy’s relationship with Jacob, who suffers from Marfan Syndrome—which could ultimately cause his aorta to fail, leading to the need for a transplant to save his life—and who is applying for jobs as a philosophy professor, which will probably result in his having to move out of New York City, a move Amy doesn’t want to make. When he’s interviewing in California, he’s texting her, screenshots of which take up part of the page; Amy’s also reading the news, which centers on climate change, Americans’ belief in fake news, and New York police using drones. She’s also trying to work on the project about Fred, which takes up more of the page. Kurzweil presents herself surrounded by everything that dominates her life, keeping her from thinking or working.

That focus on documents works well, artistically, throughout the work, as it helps the reader see and feel the amount of information inundating Amy, whether through her research on Fred or simply living in the twenty-first century, echoing one of the other questions Amy’s dealing with: what makes up a life, or how do we know a person? It also matches the realistic style Kurzweil takes throughout the book, as she primarily uses detailed pencil sketches to convey her story. At times, she’ll break into those mimetic drawings with more freehand portrayals of her grandfather that one would find in a sketchbook. Those not only seem to be reflective of where her mind has gone in the midst of a scene but also a more romantic, idealized view of her grandfather. Not surprisingly, they almost always relate to his love of music, which mirrors Amy’s love of drawing.

Ray ultimately works with a tech company, Fictio, to develop the Fredbot, an attempt at an AI algorithm that can persuasively speak in his father’s voice. Amy has the chance to evaluate it by asking it a series of questions. She is initially able to take pictures and the employee tells her she will receive a copy of the document created through her interaction, but the company backtracks on those promises. Ray has to step in to get that information, but, in the meantime, Amy asks questions about whether she can un-experience those moments. Throughout the book, she wonders about how we move through time and space, and even this fictional interaction with her long-dead grandfather leads her to question how she exists in this world. She wonders whether it’s knowledge and data that make us who we are, which is how her father seems to see the world, or if there’s something else. Early in the book, for example, she keeps referring to people or places that don’t have or once had, but have lost, their soul, whether that’s San Francisco or her father’s worldview.

The interaction with the Fredbot reinforces this idea, as the AI is able to answer basic factual questions, though only to the extent that it can access that information from the data the company has entered. For example, when Amy tries to ask about what life was like in Vienna when he was a child, the Fredbot can only talk about the work he did in Vienna before he left, with no mention of his childhood. Similarly, when she asks about whether he experienced anti-Semitism, the Fredbot comes back to talking about work. Amy tries to give it personal traits, as she comments, “His memories of Vienna feel missing. Or suppressed.” However, the Fredbot isn’t suppressing memories; it simply doesn’t have access to them. The real Fred might or might not have experienced anti-Semitism; he might have repressed it, if he did, but Amy and Ray will never know that. This problem is brought even more to the forefront when Amy asks the Fredbot to consider the meaning of life. The answers it produces don’t directly answer the question, though Amy sees what she needs in those answers. It’s not the Fredbot that helps her; she helps herself, but she doesn’t know that yet.

She does ultimately learn that lesson, though, both through her pseudo-relationship with Fred and her real relationship with Jacob. In trying to understand what the meaning of life is, she realizes that Fred might have found his, even if she can’t truly know what it is, which might help her understand hers. Jacob, though, takes a quite different approach, not surprisingly, given that he’s a philosophy professor. His response is that the question is not a good question, so he rejects it. He comments, “The question presupposes that lives are the kind of thing that can have a meaning.” He pushes further to say, “What you might be asking is ‘What’s the purpose of life?’ but even that’s too broad.” When Amy challenges him to give a better question, he replies, “What’s the purpose of your life?” By the end of the book, Amy seems to be more at peace with her answers to that question. She doesn’t understand all she wants to, as none of us do, but this work is her attempt to understand who she is and what she is meant to do with her life. In finding her answers, she encourages readers to find their own, as well.