In this paper, I discuss the nostalgic encounters that a group of preservice teachers experienced while reading two graphic novels about adolescent life: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's "This One Summer" and Lynda Barry's "My Perfect Life." Using the conceptual touchstones of psychoanalytic theory, I pay close attention to the psychic uses (those that deal with unconscious processes) these readers make of nostalgia about adolescence, asking: How do these readers/preservice teachers use their feelings of nostalgia to guide their understandings of adolescent experience? In this exploration, I question how the nostalgic past may help to reveal the latent anxieties of the present. Nostalgia is theorised as a complex, undetermined and ambivalent affective category, where instances of bitter and sweet emotion interact in the various uses that readers make of their memories and imaginings of childhood and adolescence.