Sacha Mardou

I decided to read this book because it was on a list, so I started it knowing nothing about it, having read none of the dust jacket copy beyond the title. So it wasn't until page 30 when the author mentions her first graphic novel is being published that I finally looked at her bio info to see if I had read it. Imagine my surprise when I see it was Sky in Stereo, a book I despised and gave a 1-star rating here on Goodreads back in 2016.

Well, Sacha Mardou has gotten much better at graphic show more memoirs since then.

Sky in Stereo was about Mardou as an angsty teen doing drugs. In Past Tense she's an anxious woman in her forties finally trying to come to terms with trauma caused by her father's very poor decisions.

At one point, Mardou says, "My dad is seriously the worst person I know," and her book makes a pretty good case to back that up, outlining his infidelity, domestic violence, and child molestation (for which he served time in prison). Mardou is a child of divorce and cross-pollinated stepfamilies with half-siblings that resulted when her parents each married one of the people from another divorcing couple, who divorced because the wife -- a coworker and neighbor of Mardou's mother -- started an affair with Mardou's father, whom she met while he was having a custody visit with his children. Mardou's mother responds to all this turmoil by becoming a fervent member of Jehovah's Witnesses, which creates its own set of problems.

Yeah, the schadenfreude is off the charts!

With the help of a couple therapists and a strong commitment to the Internal Family Systems model of therapy, Mardou unpacks all her memories and the tangle of emotions they have caused, trying to find a way forward that won't pass her trauma onto her husband and daughter. It's a moving and interesting journey hindered only slightly by Mardou's limitations as a cartoonist.

(Best of 2024 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2024
• Publishers Weekly 2024 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2024: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made the PW and NPR lists.)

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents: Part 1 -- Family Man -- Leaving the Past Behind -- Catching Up -- Face It -- Part 2 -- My First Session -- Parameters -- It's . . . Complicated -- Going Home -- Unpacking -- Her Divorce -- Her Love Life -- Summer 1983 -- #metoo -- Year's End -- Anniversary -- Parts Work? -- So What Is IFS? -- What is Self-Energy? -- Switching -- Part 3 -- The Parent Swap -- The Bad Year -- Incest -- Gail -- Forever -- Leaving -- Unblending Parts -- Therapy Is for People with Real Problems -- Motherfucker -- Legacy -- The Body Keeps the Score -- MysteryAanxiety -- Therapy Convert -- Someplace New -- Part 4 -- Leftovers -- Drawn Out? -- A Sudden Loss -- Upended -- Circling Back -- Checking Out -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- About the Author show less

Oh, this is sooo horrible. I was initially drawn in by what I thought would be an examination of the main character's interaction with the Jehovah's Witnesses. But that aspect of the story was pretty quickly dismissed and then it turned into a typical teen angst story with lots of crushes and awkward sexuality. I was thinking of stopping reading around page 70 but thought I'd push through to the end since it wasn't very long. That was a stupid, stupid choice on my part. Literally, the second show more half of the book is just the main character walking around on an acid trip. She stares at litter on the ground and believe she is finding direction and making profound connections. I'm left with the unsettling feeling that the author is endorsing drug use. "Look how interesting drugs can make even the most inane or crappiest aspects of your life!" Or maybe, by making the reader suffer through 90 pages of garbage, the author hopes to make the reader realize drugs are a bad thing. In the end, I do not know and I really don't care. And since I didn't bother to read the back of the book before I began, I did not realize this was the first part of a series and that pushing through to the end of this odious work would leave me without an actual ending. A preview of the next volume shows the main character being forced into some sort of awful drug rehab. I almost want to read it to see her suffer for the ordeal she put me through in reading about her in this bad, bad book. But I'm not that stupid. show less

Man, that is one long acid trip.