Content Warning: This article contains recommendations to graphic memoirs that contain themes including—but not limited to—eating disorders, sexual assault, grooming, bipolar disorder, and hospitalisation. Reader discretion is advised.
My first encounter with graphic memoirs was around the time I was obsessed with reading graphic novels, which I’d borrow from my cousin or buy from comic book conventions or the local comic bookstore. At the time, the concept of graphic memoirs didn’t grasp me like fictional comics did; I was stimulated more with conventional figures that fought bad guys and had special powers. Little did I know these same features could be found in graphic memoirs, presented through grounding forces of realism and everyday characters.
First of all—why should anyone read graphic memoirs? Combining the visual and the textual into an autobiographical form is a great way for younger audiences to access age-appropriate memoirs, which can be a wonderful stepping-stone for exploring written memoirs. In these wonderful personal tales, text and image also become symbiotic, as they aid each other in creating a more immersive reading experience full of personal feelings and experiences. The two graphic memoirs I first read turned out to be the ones that I would always recommend, as they helped me see through other perspectives on sensitive and personal issues.
Lighter Than My Shadow by Katie Green
This graphic novel follows the story of Katie through her childhood all the way through to young adulthood. The focus of her story revolves around the struggles she endures through her experiences with eating disorders and how they impact her interactions with people in her everyday life including her family and friends. The narrative voice of the piece helps the reader listen as she reflects back on her past behaviours and combines both the emotional and educational sides of her journey of restricting, being diagnosed, and relapsing. Her simplistic style of images illustrating the joys of her formative years are progressively interrupted by distorted images of herself as her eating disorder takes over her thoughts and sense of clarity. This memoir really gives Green the ability to listen to her younger self through the immense traumas involving eating disorders and grooming that eventually overwhelm her. However, writing this memoir also gifts Green with the ability to see her survive and thrive as she goes to therapy and fights back against her traumas.
RX: A Graphic Memoir by Rachel Lindsay
This memoir starts out a little different—we are welcomed into a scene depicting Lindsay in the midst of a manic episode in the psychiatric E.R. But what follows reopens that much needed talk about the advertised and commercial presentations of mental illness. Sitting in a room after being committed in the opening, Lindsay states: ‘you won’t know the shape of your own unravelling until it happens.’ These moments of clarity, dispersed by the lows and highs of bipolar, are what really come through amidst the chaos of this graphic memoir. Her art style is simplistic, but bursts from the page particularly when depicting the chaotic moments of her story. Her experiences with the American mental health system and being incarcerated help readers really see her personal perspective which is presented as being unheard in her memoir. ‘Sanity is a performance’ in Lindsay’s own words, and readers watch the unmasking of sanity itself in this raw and engaging memoir.
What graphic memoirs would you recommend? Have any impacted the way you view certain topics, in life or in literature? Leave a comment down below!
Iona
@_satsuei_
Comments