For my second guest on Monomythic, we spoke with comics creator Natalie Norris about her debut graphic memoir. About a month and change ago I gave the book a 4.5-star review and I still hold true to it. I think stories like these matter more so now than ever before in an age where there’s just so much noise and not a lot of substance.
It’s hard to talk about because, well, it’s about trauma. How to survive it. How it happened to girls like Natalie. For anyone who’s ever survived sexual assault and really, for anyone who’s ever had to deal with or talk about stories of rape. This one will probably connect with you in a way most works don’t. Natalie Norris reaches for an understanding better than the plot or conviction of how horrible these people were. It’s less about the perpetrator and the moral lesson learned, and instead, a personal tale that empathizes with the victim. No condemnation and shame stressed, just healing and processing.
She talks about these traumatic events of what happened to her through a letter to a friend, all drawn, as you can see below. It’s a heartwarming tale that touches on a bit of reckless adolescence, which people I grew up with, could absolutely relate to.
I can’t stress enough, how much I like that Natalie stresses her own wild child behavior. She does so not to shame but to emphasize that people acted this way, especially a decade ago and it’s important to stress that even if so, horrible agency-reducing things did happen when we weren’t paying attention. Stories like these often did get lost because we normalized them as typical reckless youth behavior, which muddled the way. Anyway, listen to the episode and buy the memoir if stories like these intrigue you.
