Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir

In an intellectually interesting exercise, a transgender woman makes a roman à clef graphic diary wherein she portrays herself as a cis-gender woman. Unfortunately, she then spends most of the book writing about a time when she isolated herself to work on her first graphic novel and way, way, way too many panels are spent describing what she food she is eating for lunch and which wine she is drinking with it. And then joking about how much wine she is drinking, and then drinking more wine, and more wine, and more wine. So, I'm worried about her unresolved drinking problem, but found myself too bored to care about much else.

It didn't help that the lettering is atrociously stylized and rather than being able to read sentences, I found show more myself reading each individual word, pausing frequently to second-guess my first interpretation. Tedious. show less

If I really must rate this I'd say it's middle-of-the-road compared to Apsara Engine, but that's kind of unfair because 1. Apsara Engine is such an extremely bold breakout collection that covers so many different kinds of things (including some genre stuff that's especially catnippy for me) and 2. this is still a fascinating sort-of-memoir comic, solidly written and drawn, with some startling choices that I think make the meandering parts work a lot better than they otherwise would, and it doesn't really remind me of any other book in that category. The big moment when a love-interest character confronts the protagonist, and finally points out an issue that's been entirely left out of the story so far, is a powerful one—not just for show more being conceptually surprising (it's almost the exact opposite of how such realizations are often presented, in more than one way), but also because of how Som underplays it and lets the characters choose to carry on and table it for now, without any big changes in the storytelling approach. That's insightful in terms of how major epiphanies really can take a long time to visibly bear fruit even after the cards are on the table. There are also long stretches of mundane family/career/lifestyle observations which can feel more tentative and formless; to some extent I think that's necessary in order for the later parts to have the impact that they do, and there's plenty of well-observed detail—and I'm not sure I've ever seen this kind of experience of feeling like you're probably an artist, but never getting anything done, depicted so convincingly in terms of how the feeling is often "I'm boring and I have no real problems or interests and I should be focusing on practical things" rather than "I'm a deep tortured soul." I identify with that for sure and I can imagine it won't work as well for some other readers. And it's clear that (as the author says in the foreword) the book wasn't exactly planned out that way and took a while to find its feet, but I like where it lands and the messiness just makes me more excited to see what's next. show less

After writing Apsara Engine, Som started writing this graphic memoir in the form of a comics journal, using the character of Anjali, a cis woman, as a stand-in for herself, a trans woman. On the podcast T4T, Som described this process as a form of therapy which led her to deepened understanding of her own identity. When Som came out as trans, Anjali was “free to go off and do her own thing,” which is when her character diverged and developed into more than just a mirror for Som’s experience. It’s a story of process and self-discovery, full of music references and food (there’s a recipe for kichuri at the end). Wonderfully done!

In this “almost” graphic memoir, the transgender author, uses an alter-ego, Anjali, to tell her story of growing up in Ethiopia, India, and New York City. It looks at her relationship with her traditional parents and how she finally discovered her creative dream, drawing comics. It wasn’t a perfect read but I liked it enough to recommend it.