While in some parts, this book was difficult to follow, I tried to just ride the journey with the author. This had to be an arduous task to undertake. To truly face all the parts of you that are broken and then put it on the page for the world to see? That is commendable. ( )

graphic memoir; one woman's experiences dealing with her eating disorder and grief

feels anticlimactic at the end, but I think this is due to the author's merely trying to represent her experiences faithfully without minimal editing if any. She includes a lot of her dark thoughts and anxiety so I felt this was a valuable account for the sake of #mentalhealthawareness ( )

Kim Krans had an awful year involving infertility, miscarriage, and divorce that led to midlife crisis, depression, an eating disorder, and this book. I feel sorry for what she has undergone, and some readers will probably find this "raw graphic memoir" with its mission statement of "drawing the feeling" to be quite moving. There are some individual pages that are quite remarkable.

Unfortunately, I'm a cynical old bastard and mostly found the "raw" to be messy, the "graphic" to be scribbly, and the "memoir" to be sketchy, withholding, and at times a sort of hair shirt performance piece.

From what I can glean, Krans dropped out of her daily life to live in an ashram in Pennsylvania for a month while producing this book as a daily diary of her emotional state. It's a variation on the 24-hour comic that has been around for decades. She seems to begin the project aware that she is producing a book, going so far to include a draft for the cover on page 30, just three days into her stay.

She does not disclose in the book whether she has already sold the project to a publisher as she begins or is producing it on spec to shop around afterward. I was curious about the ashram, so I checked the website of the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and their current posted rates are $160/day for single room with an additional fee of $40/day for amenities (meals, classes, etc.), meaning a 30-day retreat would run $6,000. Also, her stay in the ashram followed a two-week trip to India just two months previous (And there is a New York City sublet in play throughout this?) Admittedly, I don't know what Himalaya Institute rates were in April 2019 or if Krans had some sort of discount, publisher's advance, or other subsidy to cover her stay, but I find myself distracted by all the above, wondering what role finances and/or a possible deadline played in the production of the book.

Having read several books about antiracism in the last few weeks, I'm additionally distracted as I consider the cultural appropriation aspects of Krans' obsession with the spirituality and alternative medicines of India and other countries.

When I could focus on the pages of the book, I found much of them devoted to a skeletal stand-in for the author, which creates an odd dissonance in a work that repeatedly stresses "truth" and not filtering. And I was a bit flummoxed by the climax of the book -- teased repeatedly throughout -- being an immense gratitude for oatmeal preparation.

Bottom line: This book was not for me, but I do not deny that others may find it compelling or cathartic. ( )

My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQa25AjWFsQ

Enjoy! ( )