It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth
An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel
by Zoe Thorogood
2022
It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.
I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.
There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.
Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.
I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.
The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.
Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:
"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."
"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."
I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.
I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.
There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.
Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.
I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.
The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.
Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:
"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."
"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."
I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.
Eternity Girl was great. Did not think I'd ever see that referenced again lol. That whole Young Animal imprint was excellent... well almost all of it, maybe a couple mid or duds, but Eternity Girl might actually have been my favorite of them all, like very narrowly but still.
ReplyDeleteI liked "Shade the Changing Girl" an awful lot. (A friend warned me off "Shade the Changing Woman," and I trusted her advice.)
DeleteI liked how weird and ambitious the "Milk Wars" crossover was.
"Far Sector" was great, and I like that it seems to have kicked off a series of stand-alone miniseries where superheroes go off to have space adventures far from home.