Reviews and Comments

Reading Mardou's comics about internal family systems has been life changing, so I owe her a debt. This is a beautifully composed work of art and a dramatic personal journey. She does a great job balancing powerful bits of info from trauma research and psychology with story telling. Overall I highly recommend.

Four stars because I felt something was missing. I actually think I got more from reading comics on her socials, that went into more short-story style deep dives on CPTSD flashbacks and crises, and how she used IFS to handle them. I wish there had been just a few more of these in the book. The story is there, but the moments where she was really lost seemed wrapped up in too pretty of a package. The comics she published online while writing this got lost in the confusion of emotional flashbacks, and that was more meaningful to me in terms of "how do we handle trauma as adults?" The book by itself feels like you could do Internal Family Systems therapy as a linear progression.

I highly recommend reading the book and also exploring her work she's published on instagram and elsewhere.

Very upper middle class, very heteronormative, very neurotypical. It's like attachment styles are perfume choices and you can make a different choice.

Lots of studies but almost every one seemed like "these kinds of people are better and happier and look they will be better and happier in the future, so if you want to be happy you should act like them." The ableism was painful. The heteronormative erasure of queer love was painful. No serious reckoning with trauma or racism or desire or anything that actually shapes people's lives.

I would have enjoyed a light hearted memoir about the author's friendship journey, which really seemed to be at the core of what she was trying to say. Even more if that memoir got more serious and started playing on the queer desire that repeatedly gets written off and supressed throughout each anecdote, personal and historical. A la "Carol," a la "The Hours."

We all have the public, achievement, visible side of our lives. And then the parts of our life that may or may not be visible, but that's how we are really doing. That's what we really want to talk about. That's where the heartbreak is. This book is a guide to the heartbreak parts, to how we are really doing. Not a self-help book about how to get through school or your first job, but about how to get through the heartbreak and feelings of rejection or the true friendships or how to take steps toward what makes your heart soar. It's like the essential oil of advice columnists, the part where they reflect back to you what your real concerns and priorities are.

I want to gift this book as a sweet 16 present, a graduation present, a 40th birthday present, to just about everyone as well as myself. It's one of those books where you don't really read it, you work through a page and then let that page ferment in your mind for a month.

It helps with some of the trickiest things. How to know when your instincts are telling you no versus when your conditioning or that critical voice in your head is undermining your dreams. How to thrive where there is no time, no money, no rest. How to apologize. How to argue. How to receive a compliment or criticism. Not just "you should accept compliments" but how to actually do these things, step by step, with illustrations and bullet points. Like "how to be a better human for dummies." Without universalizing, without skirting over the our entanglement in imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

I need my own copy to refer to and another to cut out and make posters for my wall.

I'm always impressed when someone can piece together early memories, in this case ages 3-7, into a coherent story. Of course in this one the historical traumas pierce through moments of early childhood, making them more clear and more painful.

The main story is like holding a small child's hand and listening to all they have to say. It's lovely and sad and hopeful. Some moments are beautiful and some terrifying. This quote stands out, right before a terrifying story of the power imbalance of being surrounded by occupying soldiers:

"Summer passed, erasing the last traces of wildflowers and green grass. Migrating birds appeared as though barrels of confetti had been poured across the sky and swirled in endless formations. I waved to them." (160)

But I think the beginning, being a teenager on a bus and being stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers, is most powerful for me. I don't know how anyone could read that and not desperately want to end apartheid. The fear, uncertainty, and entrapment in those hours of waiting under armed guard. This is immediately after watching a teenager beaten for reacting to the fear by giggling:

"We stand still like trees--no talking, no looking at one another, no asking questions, no requesting water or trips to the bathroom, no sitting or squatting. We no not know what we are waiting for or why we are waiting. The hours stretch like rubber bands that break and snap against our skins, measured by the ticking of boots, going and coming across the yard, in and out of the building. I keep my eyes on our main guard, . . .He looks at us as though we are only suitcases in his custody." (7)

This is all for riding a bus.

I think what I wanted from this book was more interweaving of the teenager's and child's perspective, more comparisons or maybe more complexity in the parallels. But I think it is meant to be a simple story and in a way, it is. There's not really judgement or analysis, the teenager is still in a way a child just witnessing.