How I Tried to Be a Good Person picks up directly where its predecessor left off, recounting an intense story of a utopian menage a trois that evolves into a love affair that becomes prossessive and violent. Revealing and powerful, Lust recounts her life as a young, enthusiastic anarchist making her way in Vienna in the 1990s - and of her love for two men: the 'perfect companion' Georg, an actor 20 years her elder, and the 'perfect lover', Kimata, a Nigerian man-about-town. As her relationships with the two men evolve, jealousy increasingly mounts and leads to emotional and violent outbreaks that threaten her life. How I Tried to Be a Good Person is a story of sexual obsession, gender conflict, and self-liberation – told with an unflinching honesty.
Ulli Lust's previous graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, was one of 2013's surprise hits, garnering an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, the Angouleme Revelation Prize, as well as being nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize, and being named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2013. The book was internationally lauded as a dense, sensitive, autobiographical masterpiece detailing one rebellious teenage summer spent hitchhiking across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily.