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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Zoe’s honest and vulnerable take on her mental health moved me to tears, especially in the closing scenes. I felt seen and I want to thank Zoe for creating this beautifully and uniquely drawn graphic novel. Will definitely read more of her work!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Self harm, Suicide
Self-absorbed rambling. Art style is cool though.
cw: unsettling visual depictions of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation
"THIS BOOK WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST", but I am grateful that it does.
It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earthis a memoir depicting six months of Thorogood's life around the dreaded year of 2020.
Throughout the story, Thorogood also manages to provide her own commentary and thoughts on trauma, family, being a well-known artist, friendship, narrative structure, and more.
The art is what truly impacted me while reading this book. I am not referring to my enjoying the art style, but rather how the art style managed to grab me by the throat and make me physically feel what was being depicted. From the wriggling worms of anxiety beneath the skin to the ever-present and horrifying stoic shadow of depression, the - sadly familiar - unsettling sensations truly immersed me in this story.
It's raw, it's ugly, and it's familiar. Yes, it's unsettling, but that is precisely why this story made me feel less alone in living in this weird-ass world.
"THIS BOOK WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST", but I am grateful that it does.
It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earthis a memoir depicting six months of Thorogood's life around the dreaded year of 2020.
Throughout the story, Thorogood also manages to provide her own commentary and thoughts on trauma, family, being a well-known artist, friendship, narrative structure, and more.
The art is what truly impacted me while reading this book. I am not referring to my enjoying the art style, but rather how the art style managed to grab me by the throat and make me physically feel what was being depicted. From the wriggling worms of anxiety beneath the skin to the ever-present and horrifying stoic shadow of depression, the - sadly familiar - unsettling sensations truly immersed me in this story.
It's raw, it's ugly, and it's familiar. Yes, it's unsettling, but that is precisely why this story made me feel less alone in living in this weird-ass world.
dark
sad
Would’ve been great a few years ago. I think it just wasn’t right for me right now
emotional
fast-paced
هی نگهش داشتم بیام بعدا براش چیزی بنویسم اما فعلا چ هرچی بخوام بنویسم فکر میکنم یکم شخصی میشه.
کتاب بسیار خوبی بود. طراحیهاش و موضوعش و اصلا ابعاد و مدلی که به موضوع پرداخته بود مناسب بودند.
از معرفیهای مائده بود و به ریویوی خفن مائده ارجاعتون میدم.
کتاب بسیار خوبی بود. طراحیهاش و موضوعش و اصلا ابعاد و مدلی که به موضوع پرداخته بود مناسب بودند.
از معرفیهای مائده بود و به ریویوی خفن مائده ارجاعتون میدم.
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a clever, candid, and intimate book. Thorogood lays bare her intentions at the jump, to document six months of her life after contemplating suicide, and delivers art that feels like rinsing a wound. She doesn’t flinch from difficult topics, but she does cringe at her experiences with them.
Indeed, she’s not gentle with herself — depicting and criticizing unflattering moments of awkwardness, inertia, and unkindness — and even feelings of hope or sympathy are questioned as insincere or self-serving. At one point, she says her present unhappiness is self-inflicted and deserved. I think one of the things many readers will find relatable here is how sharp and cruel a metaphorical knife she turns inward, uncertain what's "true" and what's depression, or where the distinction lies.
Along the way, she is accompanied by a Greek chorus of her selves, each drawn in a different way: simplified self-depreciation, slightly manga-esque snark, and hyper-cartoony hope, along with the looming beast of depression. I appreciated how she used them to express conflicting thoughts and feelings in a moment, accurately portraying that internal strife.
In addition to these conversations with herself, Thorogood also addresses the reader multiple times. Lonely is a very self-aware text, leaving blank pages for projection and even restarting the book midway. She makes the most of her medium, with striking compositions, deliberate colors, and a mixture of art styles and even photography to capture specific moods. She anonymizes others by drawing them as anthropomorphized animals, and this also serves to highlight her sense of alienation because the few other humans-as-humans we see are so often shown in moments of great pain, or when she tries to imagine herself as a cat, which causes its own hurt. Neither she nor we get to ever fully forget the tension of exhibitionism and voyeurism inherent to auto-bio comics, and that made for an engaging, thoughtful read.
However, for all her struggles, this is not a bleak and hopeless book. Her goal is admirable, to use her art to claim and focus six more months of living. Six months of reflection and facing the pain of change for the hope of something better. She may as well, she says. She extends compassion to her childhood self — bullied, depressed, and often dismissed as an expected casualty of girlhood — and this understanding is depicted as rejuvenating, letting her find excitement in art and buoying her across the finish line of her project. She attends a regional convention and visits the United States, and while each trip brought pains, they also brought moments of joy and clarity, and she turns them to her own ends.
There are no neat and tidy endings with works like this, but there are worthwhile and earned checkpoints. I wish the author well, and hope to see more from her in the future.
There are no neat and tidy endings with works like this, but there are worthwhile and earned checkpoints. I wish the author well, and hope to see more from her in the future.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Bullying, Alcohol
Minor: Animal cruelty
For me, and hopefully everyone else too, this is one of those special pieces of media that you find every couple of years that you lose yourself in for a brief moment, and then when you come back out you realize you’re not exactly the same person you were before. Because you’ve been changed, in some small way, for the better.