Goethe Pop Up Seattle is a German cultural exchange of sorts based out of the fancy Chop House Row on Capitol Hill. Tonight, the temporary shop welcomes both Zak Sally, a musician reading from a book about traveling around the country on a forged Greyhound bus pass, and Berlin-based cartoonist Ulli Lust. Lust's latest comic — published in America by Fantagraphics under the title How I Tried to Be a Good Person — is an unflinching comic book memoir about being young and lusty and experimental and also willing to take a tremendous amount of abuse in the name of love.

Person is the kind of memoir that begs to be described as "daring," or maybe "unflinching," or perhaps "tense." Lust describes her youthful explorations into relationships with tremendous candor. She admits to feeling dissatisfied that her lover's penis is too small ("It's taboo-- one of those things a woman can never say to her man") and she explains her polyamorous lifestyle with a nonchalance that Puritanical readers are sure to find upsetting.

But it's when Lust enters into an affair with a Nigerian immigrant named Kim that the book really feels fraught. Kim is Black and Lust is white, and everywhere they go in public, they are judged: Kim endures racism and Lust is labeled a slut. But Kim is not a heroic figure in the story: he's depicted as jealous and violent, gradually ramping up his verbal attacks into something more physical. A few sequences are so, yes, daring and unflinching and tense that readers will feel a growing ache in the pit of their stomach as they approach the end of the book. It's not a memoir about abuse, or a memoir about race, or a memoir about sex and gender dynamics — though it is certainly a memoir that touches on all those things.

As a cartoonist, Lust is clear and expressive and intelligent. The book is printed in shades of black and white an pink, putting the focus directly on Lust's confident pen strokes. There aren't many lines on the page, but every line is just the right one.

Look: not every memoir needs to be harrowing in its honesty. And many honest memoirs are interminable to read. But Person is a highwire act of a book, a story about the complications of youth and the way they prepare us for an ever-more-complex future.

Goethe Pop Up Seattle in Chop House Row, 1424 11th Ave, Suite 101, https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/gps.html, 7 pm, free.