Some people have all the luck. While Phoebe Potts isn’t one of them, she does say, “I was the right female infertile cartoonist at the right time.” Indeed she was, and because of that, the luck this time is ours.

Three years ago, West Tisbury resident and cartoonist Paul Karasik encouraged Ms. Potts to chronicle her story as a graphic memoir. In a recent telephone interview, she recalls the conversation. “He said ‘Give me five pages on fertility. Nobody’s doing it.’” After completing her assignment, she showed the five pages to an agent, who said, “Give me a chapter. I can sell this.” Sure enough a book contract soon followed and this past September, Ms. Potts’s graphic memoir, Good Eggs, was published. Mind you, graphic memoirs are not the incest-laden stomach churners that seemed to be the talk of the tube not long ago, but tend toward the psychologically probing, artistically compelling memoirs like Alison Bechdel’s bestselling Fun Home, Marjane Satapi’s Persopolis, which was turned into an animated feature film, and David Small’s Stitches, a National Book Award finalist for young people.

Simply put Good Eggs is a good read. The comic form in no way diminishes Ms. Potts’s story. In fact, it does the opposite. It opens up an entire new world of possibilities, one that traditional memoirs are left out of. While reading Good Eggs, I found myself wondering why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to write a memoir without drawings.

Eager to have a child, Ms. Potts and her husband, artist Jeffrey Marshall, embark on a journey that began with a romp. Resplendently depicted by Ms. Potts with an image of her and her husband running toward each other, they look delightfully like Tom Maley’s naked runners on the outside wall of the Field Gallery. “On the one hand, unprotected sex has been really liberating for us,” writes Ms. Potts. However, when sex, even when precisely scheduled for ovulation, doesn’t provide the desired results, the couple head out to what the author calls the “fertility factory.”

“I read Country Living,” she writes. “Jeff gets porn.” The image of her as a kind of Reclining Venus on a gynecologist’s table looking at a magazine and thinking, “Oooh . . . an expose on café curtains,” is hilarious.

While Ms. Potts’s story centers on her fertility frustrations — she confesses, “I’ve got a classic case of middle-class entitlement. I should be able to pick up a few toddlers at IKEA!” — this is not a book simply about trying to have a baby. She is an engaging storyteller and mines her past and her psyche in a way that many readers will likely connect with; I know I did.

Among other issues, she grapples with her Jewish identity and professional identity. She feels increasingly uncomfortable with her family’s celebration of a holiday she calls “Jewish Christmas,” and various jobs at socially responsible organizations leave her feeling unfulfilled. As for her stint as a union organizer, she writes, “My understanding was the more miserable I was, the better organizer I would be.” To take charge of her life, she decides to become a rabbi, an “aha” moment depicted in one frame by a light bulb in a thought bubble over her head and, politically corrected for the next frame, as an eco-friendly coiled bulb. It’s one of many LOL moments in a memoir that also successfully tackles such serious issues as depression and, of course, infertility.

“The medium allows you to blur the edges with memoir,” explains Ms. Potts. Indeed, there’s no need for verbiage here when ideas can be communicated succinctly and powerfully with a few drawn lines. Before she’s married, Ms. Potts meets a man she’s attracted to and shows herself being gently lifted up into the air by birds. She gleefully levitates until he mentions his girlfriend, at which point she is unceremoniously dropped so low that she has fallen out of the frame. “I wanted to show how deflated I felt,” says Ms. Potts.

Since I don’t want to give too much away, let me encourage you to read the book to find out what happens when she runs into Mr. I-have-a-girlfriend again. There are many of these clever visual moments — a therapist whose face has no outline, simply degrees on wings framing his features, and a cat who provides deft commentary.

Ms. Potts’s family moved to the Vineyard when she was in sixth grade, and she says her passion for comics developed as a child reading Tin Tin and Peanuts at the West Tisbury Library. Always artistic, and in search of what she was supposed to be doing with her life, Ms. Potts enrolled in graduate school. “I thought I was supposed to be a painter, but after being so disheartened by grad school for art I wanted to go back to the basics, which was drawing pictures and telling stories,” she says. She is now based in Gloucester.

She started Good Eggs by making lists of the things she wanted to include, then began storyboarding the lists. “It helped me figure out how to pace what happens in each panel,” she says. “How do I show this story? Now how do I show this idea?” Ms. Potts didn’t seek out much feedback while working on the book. “I didn’t want to worry about what other people thought,” she says. Her parents, West Tisbury residents Robert and Marjory Potts, were among those who didn’t see the work in progress. “Of all the voices, theirs are so powerful to me,” says Ms. Potts. The many people on the Vineyard that personally know the Pottses, have seen their documentary films or read their take on West Tisbury in The Broadside, will enjoy and may occasionally wince at the depictions of the couple. “My mom does not see all the things that I say in the book the same way that I do,” admits Ms. Potts, who jokes that her mother’s friends have been saying, “It’s a loving tribute, but thank God my child isn’t writing a memoir.” Both her parents have been extremely supportive and she adds, “I love them and admire them.”

And what about the man who said “Give me five pages on fertility,” what does he think of Ms. Potts’s book? “She exceeded my expectations,” Mr. Karasik says. “The best graphic novels — and, perhaps, novel novels — are created when the subject grabs the author by the collar, demands that they grapple, and hauls the author away to the studio. [Ms. Potts] was given no choice by the subject matter and the result is . . . soulful without being sappy.”

Phoebe Potts will be speaking and signing copies of Good Eggs at the Bunch of Grapes on Friday, Nov. 26 at 7:30 p.m.