At The Cut, Rachel Syme interviews cartoonist Cathy Guisewite.

“I also told her that, as we sat in her country-chic breakfast nook in Studio City, California, discussing the legacy of Cathy and the world Guisewite created, I could not stop thinking about my own mother, a highly functional and accomplished professional who nevertheless spent most of the 1980s yo-yo dieting and Jazzercising, seesawing between omnivorous ambitions and rigid self-control. When I was a child, my mother mainlined her morning coffee out of a chipped Cathy mug, and I came to associate that object with the kitchen as a contested space, where desserts were never just desserts. They were vessels of cacophonous mixed messages: Be powerful. Be smaller. Enlarge your dreams. Decrease your appetite. Indulge. Refuse. Stay ravenous. Don’t touch the cake.

“’Oh, no,’ Guisewite said, sighing into the receiver, after I finished what I now realize was a very Cathy-esque spiel. ‘What have I done?’”