Review by inamerata - It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

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inamerata 's review for:

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

4.5

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.

Content Warnings