Day: November 12, 2017

It’s not the easiest subject matter, and as such I was full of questions during the creative process about how much is appropriate to show and tell. My mission in creating the book was to be unflinchingly honest, to really dig in to how horrid my experience had been. I’d read so many books on the subject that seemed only to scratch the surface. I wanted to show that it does get better, but not shy away from how hard it can be and how long it takes (hence 507 pages). But was there a risk that such honesty could be harmful to potential readers?

Allow me to explain where this anxiety came from.

When I was anorexic, my mind became obsessed with numbers. I was constantly mulling over how many calories I’d eaten (or hadn’t), how much weight I’d gained (or lost), what time I would eat next and how much I would have (or how little). And there were things that exacerbated these thoughts. I read anything I could get my hands on about the illness that was consuming my life, obsessively trawling books and websites for information that might help. Instead what my brain latched on to was the numbers. I made endless comparisons with how much (or little) other people were eating, how much (or little) they weighed. It gave me a yardstick against which to measure my own illness. The result was always as follows: I was not ‘sick enough’. I needed to lose more weight. I needed to eat less. Knowing how the anorexic mind works, I did not want to provide any such yardsticks in my own book. There’s also the problem that weight is not always the best indicator of how sick someone is. It’s so often what’s cited in sensationalist media about eating disorders, and to me always rings of trying to shock. And it’s true, the low weights that people suffering with anorexia may drop down to are shocking, and I’m not saying that their lives are not in danger. I just think it can be a bit of a red herring, and so often treatments focus only on weight restoration, forgetting that this is an illness of immense psychological distress. Someone who looks ‘normal’ or even ‘fat’ may be suffering just as much as someone who looks sick.

So, I was clear from the outset that it would be neither relevant nor helpful to quote my weight – at its lowest or at any point in the story. That decision was a no-brainer. The problem (and of course the great strength) of comics is that you do not need to tell, you can show, and I have worried that publishing several hundred pages of drawings of an emaciated body may be just as harmful, if not more so, than quoting my lowest weight or calorie intake.

Readers here will be familiar with the argument that graphic storytelling can be much more powerful than prose, and we are all aware of the problem of pro-anorexia websites and ‘thinspiration’ which are rife on the internet. You’ll understand then how big my concern is that I’ve created something so strikingly similar to this kind of harmful imagery.

It’s my hope that the context in which my images are presented, and the intention of my work resolves this problem. Though they appear similar when viewed in isolation like this, I’ve tried to remember that my illustrations are in fact part of a 507 page narrative which does not in any way glorify anorexia, and whose intent is precisely the opposite.
Sometimes I wondered whether I really needed to take responsibility for this kind of thing, and whether my worry was misplaced. What’s the point in being so thoughtful about what my book contains when there is the whole wide internet out there? Anyone seeking this kind of imagery can find it with ease and in abundance. And yet, I am completely responsible for the kind of imagery I put out into the world. Even if it’s irrelevant in the wider context of what’s out there, in the wonderful self-contained format of a book, perhaps making careful choices is not entirely meaningless. I hope.