Jarrett is both the author and the protagonist of this memoir. He grows up from a sensitive kid to a normal teenager struggling with the abnormality of his background.

As a child, Jarrett is both sweet and troubled. He has frequent horrific nightmares of monsters and betrayals, which emerge from the frightening unreliability of his mother and the violent tempers of his grandparents. However, he’s also a sweet, regular kid who loves Disneyland and playing with trucks. He learns to value loving behavior over blood ties: His grandmother, he decides in the end, is more of a mother to him than his biological mom Leslie ever was.

The constant note in his personality is his love of art. All through the story, Jarrett learns to be the artist who will draw the narrative he’s currently telling in Hey, Kiddo. As he describes it, “When I was a kid, I’d draw to get attention from my family. In junior high, I drew to impress my friends. But now that I am in my teens, I fill sketchbooks just to deal with life. To survive” (214-16). In every chapter, he shows a little bit of his journey toward his career as a comics artist, from trading cartoons with Leslie while she’s in halfway houses to studying in a middle-school comics class to first getting a cartoon published in the paper.