Natalie Norris is a cartoonist, teacher and comics librarian. She has taught and lectured about depicting trauma in graphic memoirs at the 2020 Graphic Medicine Conference, the Larner College of Medicine, the Sequential Artists Workshop, and the Center for Cartoon Studies, where she graduated in 2020. Dear Mini (Fantagraphics, 2023) is her first book. She currently resides in Vermont with her chihuahua-poodle rescue, Gwen.
Karina Shor is an illustrator, a cartoonist, and a teaching artist. Karina has illustrated many children’s books under the name Alina Gorban. She grew up in a small town outside of Tel Aviv, Israel, after she immigrated from the former Soviet Union. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and now lives between Brooklyn and Tel Aviv. Silence, Full Stop. (Street Noise Books, 2023) is her debut graphic novel.
This conversation was set up by myself and was conducted over Zoom on January 2, 2024; the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
-Gina Gagliano
* * *
Karina Shor: So let’s start by imagining that we are in a coffee shop.
Natalie Norris: Wonderful. I have my tea.
KS: So, Natalie, we both just published our debut graphic novel memoirs. And we both chose to depict the most painful and traumatic parts of our lives as the first thing we published as authors. Why did we do that? Why did you feel this story needed to come out first?
NN: I had several experiences from my life that I knew I wanted to process through graphic memoir but I wasn't sure in the beginning which one to start with. The way I ended up choosing the story that became Dear Mini was when the structure of the story came to me. Choosing to write it in the form of a letter gave me a point of entry and a way to frame the story. But in terms of why tell a story that's so traumatic—especially a story about sexual trauma as my first introduction to the world—I felt like no other story carried the same emotional weight for me. Graphic novels take so many years to create and in order to maintain your focus you really do have to find the story that is calling to you the most. And nothing else from my life had the same intensity and the same need to get out of me at this moment in time.
KS: Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by ‘the structure came to you’?
NN: It was during my thesis year at CCS [the Center for Cartoon Studies] and I was trying to figure out what story I wanted to tell in a comic. I didn't have plans to do a big graphic novel for my thesis, but then one night I had an epiphany that I could tell this story as a letter to my friend Mini. A letter is all about connection, so I didn’t feel like I was in it alone. Then, once I had that framing device, it was easier to figure out how to approach the story and what to include and and not include.
KS: That’s interesting. You’re basically saying ‘I chose to do the hardest thing, but I also took certain precautions.’
NN: Right, I waited for the story to tell me how to tell it, and that reassured me that I was on the right path. I'm curious how you knew that you were ready to make Silence, Full Stop. now, and why was comics the right medium?
KS: I didn't feel like I needed to tell the story now, I always felt like I needed to tell the story. Like you, my story felt very urgent, like if I didn’t get it out in the world it’d just keep spinning in my head and driving me crazy. It was ‘spilling’ out of me at every opportunity. Whenever I had some kind of a school project to do, parts of my trauma would write themselves into short comics, or a picture book, etc. Comics is the right medium because it’s just a perfect combination of what I love doing best: drawing and writing. It’s a bit of a cliché, but I feel that comics chooses you, not the other way round. Making a graphic novel is so freaking hard and time-consuming, that if you are really into doing that to yourself, you must be a little nuts. Otherwise, there is really no logic in deciding to willingly sit at home for three years, invest all your time and energy, make your partner insane, drain your own bank account, and feel like it's the most important thing in life. So I guess I’m a little nuts for comics, it’s just speaking to my soul.
NN: I can totally relate to the story coming out at any opportunity when you don't necessarily mean for it to. I had a school assignment to make a children’s book that turned into this insanely dark, thinly veiled metaphor for what happened in Dear Mini, but with fairies and knights and evil wizards and guards. It’s such a sign when it comes out at the least appropriate moments and you can't stop yourself.
KS: What are your working hours like? Are you a night owl?
NN: Yeah I’m definitely a night owl. I made most of the book between the hours of maybe 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM.
KS: Same!
NN: It's funny, because I feel like maybe we are sort of stuck in our inner teenagers where our brains are most active at night and then sleeping in and starting the day late.
KS: Yeah, I mean if we can choose to do that, why not?
NN: Perks of being a cartoonist.
KS: In your beautiful book, Dear Mini, everything is drawn so girly and playful; the round, beautiful handwritten text, the characters that look like '70s-style illustrations, all the girls looking super-fashionable, everything seems to flow and to be decorated. And all this is in beautiful juxtaposition to the worst, darkest, graphic, traumatic scenes. In my opinion, it creates a “sugar-coating” effect that makes the story stronger and very descriptive of teenage years. What was your thinking behind these choices?
NN: It was sort of twofold. I knew that I wanted to make the story fun for me to draw and I didn't want it to just hit this one sad emotional note where my character is always looking upset and scared. That wouldn't be accurate to being a teenager, which is a time when you’re having these extreme highs and really low lows. So with the style, I was using beauty and aesthetic playfulness to both soothe myself as I was drawing, and also thinking about the reader. If I was going to bring them into these really dark places, I wanted them to feel like they had something to hold onto, almost like a life raft to carry them through the more difficult parts.
I've also realized that drawing all of the partying scenes and scenes of being continuously intoxicated, which were throughout most of the story, was its own coping mechanism, because while I draw I’m inhabiting the mind space I was in at the time. I don't drink anymore, and yet when I draw myself drinking and partying it feels like I'm being carried along with that numbing effect. It allows me to dip in and out of states of elation and then trauma and then back to elation, which makes facing the trauma easier.
KS: I really relate to what you’re saying about teenage years; that they’re up and down and all over the place, and the way that connects to your style.
NN: And that’s why I love to read about other crazy teenagers - because it's such a unique time where you are just like rollercoastering around.
KS: [Laughs] Rollercoastering around is such a great way to describe it.
NN: You have such an expressive approach to color which was something that fascinated me when reading your book. I'm thinking in particular about the scene where you first do heroin by accident. There's this amazing contrast between pages of dark blues and grays and then this light cotton candy rainbow-colored spread. And there are other moments throughout, like in the scene in which you're hitchhiking where a single panel will turn, in this case, red while the rest of the page is colored naturalistically. I’m curious how you think about color, and do you make these decisions in your head before you start drawing or do they happen intuitively as you work?
KS: The way I think about color is a bit childish. I love sunsets, so all my colors in the book are sunset colors. The sunset is the most contrasted point of the day, so I felt it was fitting to color my own teenage years with those contrasts for all the reasons we’ve mentioned. In addition, I wanted to use color to describe feelings of the moment. So in that heroin story you mention, first everything turns to blues because heroin looks like such a melancholic drug from the outside; the face of the user falls, the body collapses, and it just looks so sad. But inside the feeling is like you’re in this very comfortable dream, so much so that you never want to leave it. And so I felt all these pastel cotton candy colors were perfect for that. In other cases I use a single color to isolate a feeling - like the feeling of alarm or fear that you mention when my character is catching that ride, and the panel becomes red. I use color intuitively, but also work out an explanation in my head as to why I'm doing it. I get bored pretty fast, so I try to make it interesting for myself by changing the combinations of the set colors throughout the book. It’s kind of like what you said about your style - it feels like we are doing it for the reader, but first we did it to make the process fun for ourselves. That’s also one way I’ve found to make the worst painful memory fun to draw - I just focus on how nice the light falling from the window will look like, and it makes it easier to deal with what is actually drawn. A way to escape for a bit.
NN: There's something that can feel transformative about taking these horrible memories and making them beautiful by zooming in so closely.
KS: It’s recycled from the worst garbage of life. Don’t you agree that this is a process which gives you control over your story? Even if the control is how much you decorate a page, or what colors you choose. And to find meaning in the trauma itself is to accept reality and add a “yes and” attitude to it - meaning I can do something with the trauma now. And that feels productive as opposed to just horrific. So even though this process is so tedious, I feel it’s empowering.
I have learned so much through making this book about my process and beliefs - what is your writing process? Do you feel this book revealed new things you didn't know about how you do things?
NN: With this book, I had a totally different process than I had with earlier comics. With earlier work I would make an outline and then do thumbnails chronologically, but with this book I knew I needed to approach it differently. I started doing little sketches in my sketchbook, thinking I was just testing things out, and then as I drew a few more images I realized, wait a second, this could just be the page. Once I gave myself permission to draw whatever came out however it came out, I went into overdrive and drew 400 pages in two months. I think the most important part of my drafting process was that I didn't work chronologically. I would draw a couple pages or even just a single page from one moment and then jump to whatever my brain wanted to jump to next. For example, the body language of my character on one page might trigger a memory from years later where I was in the same position. Or I would make connections based on the emotion I felt at the time. Following these associative moments allowed me to unlock memories that I wouldn't have been able to access if I'd only looked at my diaries or only looked up photos from that time. It also allowed me to dip in and out of the really difficult scenes without feeling trapped. This was super-freeing and felt like I was performing an exorcism on myself.
From a technical perspective, I approached each page differently. Sometimes I would start with the narration text and then figure out what images would illustrate that thought. Other times I would start with the images and then add the words I wanted to accompany them. Every 50 pages or so, I would make copies on a Xerox machine, so I could put the pages in order and read through them and figure out where I had to fill in gaps in the plot. I worked really fast going straight to ink with very loose sketches so that I couldn’t second-guess myself. Once I started the final art I worked chronologically from the beginning: penciling, inking and watercoloring. I’d say it stayed about 85% true to how it was in the first draft.
Using this process really solidified for me why comics is the perfect medium to depict trauma, because it mirrors the way traumatic memory works, where each panel is just a fragment of these standalone moments. Working in this way, where I allowed myself to jump around, was so helpful because I didn't have to synthesize the pieces into a cohesive narrative while I was working. Now I want to hear about your process for drafting and writing.
KS: I also kind of didn’t know that I work in a certain way until I actually worked in a certain way. And that is because this is the first project I worked on for so long, and which is itself so long. What I discovered is that I write over time, meaning I write in my diaries daily - and, when I suddenly get an idea, in sketchbooks, throughout my life. Then, when I need to write, I take all my diaries and sketchbooks and read them, pick out things from them, edit them, write additional text inspired by those entries and ideas, and put it all in an order that fits what I’m trying to say. A lot of the time, while I write, I already see the drawing in my head, so then I sketch it fast in my sketchbook or describe it in the script. Then I go through all of the stages of sketching, inking and coloring. I always can’t wait to see what it looks like, so I sketch it nicely, not rough. I have learned from my process that inspiration can hit anywhere, at any random time, and my job is to keep myself alert and ready to catch it on paper, or a note.
NN: Interesting - it's almost like you're creating a collage with these different collected pieces of writing from different points in time. We both have been keeping diaries for most of our lives, and that plays into each of our stories. I love the way you share passages from your adolescent diary, letting your younger self speak in her own words even when there's a sharp contrast with what's happening in the scene. I’m thinking about the scenes with your boyfriend Ofel, who you call “perfect” and “the one” while he’s being truly awful. Great name choice, by the way! How did you decide when to use diary text as narration versus narration from the present?
KS: I’m very loyal to my diaries, I prefer to use the text I wrote in them as-is, translated word for word. I feel that this describes living through that time most honestly. I use the narration from the present more when I wish to guide the reader to connect the dots in a better way. Or, as in your example of when the drawing is showing something in contrast to the text, this is my comment/criticism on the events. In that particular instance, I wanted to show that my love was blind to the reality I was living in with that boyfriend then. Through this book, I have discovered that the more accurate to reality I am, the better the story is. Life is very particular and interesting, and I feel people react very strongly to something that feels real.
NN: Yes, the specificity ends up being what's most relatable. I think there’s this interesting conversation that happens with graphic memoir between different eras of yourself. For me I had more of my teenage perspective come through in the drawings. I think that's where what you referred to as “sugar-coating” comes in because I wanted to depict what was happening both accurately and true to how it happened, but also in a way that captured my teenage spirit and would make her feel excited to have her story be told. But the narration text is more from my adult self who’s writing the letter. So you have these different layers communicating with each other. But as I was writing the narration I also realized that with trauma, even though I'm writing it in the present, there is still a part of me that is so stuck in that teenage mindset. So, some of the letter is also representative of the ways in which that teenage perspective has been cemented in my current ways of viewing the world.
KS: I agree. The traumatic experience did put a big bookmark in our heads.
NN: Definitely. When a really big trauma happens, it changes your view of the world. When it happens to you at a young age the way you make sense of it is often pretty skewed, because you don't understand the world to begin with, and you're seeing it through the lens of a child's mind or a teenager's mind. Then, as an adult, it becomes your job to untangle what is true about the way that you made sense of it, and what is skewed by not having enough information because you were too young.
KS: I feel it’s amazing to be able to do that, to rearrange our memory. We are lucky that we went through the making of the books, even though it felt like suffering throughout. It did change something in my mind about the experiences.
NN: Yeah, I think externalizing these experiences has become a tool to process what happened. Even though I had the individual memories, I wasn’t able to make any kind of sense of them or put them into a cohesive narrative. So putting it in chronological order in the final book allowed me to be able to sit down with the full story and look at it and try to make sense of what I was seeing in a more cohesive way.
KS: Are you able to read your book now that you’ve finished it?
NN: I've gone through periods where I don't want to look at it. But when I was working on it before it was published I would look at the pages all the time and go back to different moments and try and process them. Are you able to read your book?
KS: I’m the same. I'm very happy that the making process is over. I love that it’s on my shelf now.
NN: You play with chronology in interesting ways, like inserting the scene about the horse when you're a little child midway through the book. What was your process like for deciding how to structure the book?
KS: The order of the book follows the logic I create through the events. It builds connections to try and explain myself, to myself. I sometimes jump through time, and dive into this ‘thought void,’ all to say something about the character (essentially myself), and to make connections between my behaviors and my traumas. I did this to give everything the attention and space it needed to be processed. I used to minimize my traumas, shove them under the rug and not deal with them. Making this book and sitting down to analyze it mentally and visually for three years is my way of validating it, giving it the room that it needs to heal.
NN: I love that.
KS: Did you put everything in chronological order in your book?
NN: Most of it is. There are a few moments where, in order to make the story more cohesive, I condensed some things and changed a little bit of the chronology. For example, the part where I go to Italy for a class trip has some moments that happened slightly out of order, but I only changed things that didn’t matter in the larger scheme of the narrative. I always came back to the question of what was important for Mini to understand. The one moment where I played with chronology in a stylistic way was with the first experience of sexual assault that happens right before I go on my trip. I did this in order to give the reader the feeling of shock that I had at the time. It drops you right into the moment after I was assaulted and then goes back a couple hours to show you how it got there. Other than that, everything else is shown linearly.
KS: When you decided to write this letter to Mini, did you talk to her about it beforehand? Did you want to get her opinion on it, or just inform her you were writing the book like that?
NN: I reached out to Mini after I had written the first draft to get her permission to continue with the book. Because the story is written as a letter from me to her, it was less about getting her perspective and more about receiving permission to tell my side of the story. I’m super-grateful that she has taken the approach that ultimately it's my story and she’s very supportive of my need to tell it.
KS: Did you feel like you needed to change the characters' looks, or their names in your book to conceal their identity?
NN: I changed some of the appearances but not all of them, and I changed almost everyone's name. I also changed my last name in order to create some distance, and also for my family’s sake. With memoir, it's about protecting people you care about by changing their names and appearances and also protecting yourself from potential retaliation. Making the decisions of who I changed and how much was something that I approached differently with each of the characters - particularly those who behaved in abusive ways. But for people who have no connection to the story, I don't think they would be able to figure out who these people were.
KS: It was very hard for me to change the appearance of some characters.
NN: Totally, you don’t want to lose the specificity! There’re so many aspects of someone’s personality that come out in the way that they dress or in their hairstyle, or even the way they carry themselves. It's all part of who they are as a character. Sometimes, with minor characters, I would create an amalgamation. Another hack I’d use would be, say, I'm drawing a troubling boyfriend, [but] I’d transpose a different troubling boyfriend’s face with someone else’s hair onto the character so it still felt like it had the emotional intensity of someone I recognized, but with different pieces creating the character design.
KS: Did you design the characters separately, ahead of the drawing?
NN: Only for the primary assailant in the book. I was really scared to draw him and make his face a concrete thing because up until that point it had only existed in my memory - I've never seen a photo of him. So in order to get to a place where I could start drawing those scenes I had to sketch him out from different angles and solidify how I was going to draw him. Whereas with other characters I would just figure it out as I went along.
KS: I agree, with characters you really know well, it’s easy to draw them. With my family, I can draw them without even thinking. With other characters, I needed to study them from different angles on a separate page.
NN: Yes, to figure out the way you're going to keep them consistent. Did you always know that you would use a pen name for your book? What was your thought process behind that?
KS: I’ve had this pen name for a few years now. While I was doing my thesis at SVA, an art director came to see our work, and she advised me to keep my children’s book illustrations separate from my more graphic comics work. So I started playing around with a pen name, and it felt so liberating. I suddenly didn’t censor myself because I was afraid of what my mom would think, or what the people that hired me to draw wholesome kids’ stuff would think. It also felt like it created a healthy distance when I was using the word ‘she’ instead of ‘me,’ as to say ‘it happened to her’ as opposed to ‘it happened to me.’
NN: Totally, it's like the character version of you who’s standing in for what you experienced, like an avatar.
KS: Exactly. This version can be anything you want but are too afraid to be.
NN: I love that.
KS: We each have different approaches to how graphic our traumatic memories are drawn. At the end of your book, you include pictures of your real-life journals and photos. Talk about why this decision was important to you.
NN: When I first started planning to make the book I told myself I wouldn't get into the details of what happened, it would just be a short comic exploring my emotions around the assault and my relationship to Mini. I think I had to tell myself that in order to trick myself into doing the story. But underneath, I always knew that I would have to go through all the details, and for me the details have been the hardest part. I know you and I have different experiences with this in terms of how much we remember the specific sexual trauma, but because I remembered it so vividly I felt really alone in holding all these fragmented pieces of memory. I recently found an entry from my teenage diary from a few weeks after the rape in Austria where I wrote that the reason I was going to keep this a secret forever was because, “I didn’t want to put that image into someone else’s mind.” It's ironic that the thing I was most afraid of was the thing that I actually had to do to heal. I can see now that my desire to protect the people I loved from the images of what I went through was actually a sign that the images were too much for me to carry alone. Even as I tried to run from the memories, all of the art that I made from that point on would always come back to this experience in some way or another. With this book I knew that I finally had the drawing skills and storytelling capabilities that made me feel ready to face the images that had haunted me for so long.
As to including the journals and photos at the end of the book, I’ve always loved when memoirs have source material at the end because it really roots the story in reality. Over the years I had been holding onto all of this material, but I never showed it to anyone. Then when I made the book I had this need to finally show people everything all together. Maybe it was a trauma response. Maybe I still felt like I needed to prove to the reader that these things did happen and there’s evidence from the time that proves that.
KS: It’s a very troubling effect of sexual assault, that feeling of doubt: maybe it didn't happen as I remember, maybe it was my fault, maybe I didn't understand the situation, and so on. It's so hard to grasp that someone can be just bad to you for no logical reason you can understand. I used to constantly second-guess myself about what had happened. So I understand why you felt the need to root it in reality. As you mentioned, since what happened to me happened at such a young age, I don't remember it vividly; it has been an eternal quest to try to remember, and prove to myself it happened.
Did anybody in your world know about it when it happened to you?
NN: I told my parents that I had been raped a little more than a year later, and I didn’t tell Mini for three years. There was only one boyfriend in college who I told the whole story to. It just came out unintentionally, and that was a really overwhelming experience for me and especially for him. After seeing how intensely it impacted him, I never went through the whole story again, even in therapy. Several different therapists I saw encouraged me not to talk about all the details, which I found frustrating.
KS: From the experience of making this book, I’ve learned that facing the actual details is the thing that has the most impactful relief - but first it does re-traumatize you, and only then it heals. Earlier, you mentioned that many people shy away from the details, which makes you feel shame around it - so I feel it is necessary and important that you have put it on paper exactly as you remembered it.
NN: Yes, I’ve noticed a tendency for depictions of sexual violence to fade out before the rape actually happens, or you just get one moment that stands in for the whole experience. But I wanted my story to not just show that rape happens but how it happens. Even though I said no and resisted, I was still convinced that it was my fault because of the way the events had unfolded. And I wanted other people who may have blamed themselves because of some particular thing they did during the assault to see that fixating on the details of the experience in order to invalidate yourself is really just a coping mechanism our brain uses to protect us from the overall horror of what happened.
KS: Now that your book is done and out in the world, do you feel it made a difference in how you're able to talk about your trauma, because it's a real thing - bound in a book that you can hold rather than a memory running in your head?
NN: Putting the book into the world has been a really interesting process, and my reaction to it has surprised me. One of the things I realized recently was that I was waiting for other people to read the book and then essentially tell me what happened - to put it into words, because it had always been so difficult for me to define the experience. A lot of what happened to me falls through the cracks of definitions. In particular how the assault happened with multiple perpetrators, but only one carried out the rape. For a long time I didn't know how to make sense of that group dynamic, because it wasn’t fully ‘gang rape.’ But an important element of the trauma was attached to these other perpetrators. So when I put the story out there, I kept waiting for reviews or interviewers to essentially define my experience for me, but no one did. No one would even touch it. And that was confusing. And it initially compounded my feelings of shame because it made me wonder, why isn't anyone talking about the events in the book? Now I've reached a point where I think it's a good thing that other people haven't been defining it, because I realize with stories about trauma it's really important that you come to an understanding yourself and decide how you want to talk about what happened to you. Reflecting on all of this has definitely changed my expectations of what it means to put work about trauma into the world.
I want to talk a little about secrets. For me, one of the challenges with my book is that I'm able to make art about things that I don't know how to talk about in my daily life, even with people close to me. How much of your story do you think was new to the people close to you? And were there parts that still felt like a secret you were keeping from yourself? And then how have you navigated setting boundaries around what you want to talk about versus what you want the art to speak for on its own?
KS: It has been a challenge. I wasn't thinking about this moment when I was making the book. I was so immersed in the process, and that freed me. I didn’t want to think about what others will think, or how much my close friends and family know or don't know about my past. Some people were surprised. I didn't prepare anyone in my life for it. My close friends knew I was working on the book, but not its content. This might have been a selfish decision on my part, but it helped me to tell the story in the most honest way I could. I didn’t want to censor myself. In the end, it's my lived experience, and whoever doesn’t like it, that's okay by me. I know I sound cool about it, but I did have some anxiety around it when the book was about to come out. I'm just so tired of minimizing my experience to myself, and to the world, that I decided that I don’t need permission to act on the thing that helps me heal. These days it’s still strange when someone introduces me and says “This is Karina, she wrote this book. Tell them about your book, Karina.” This is when I turn all colors and don’t really know what to say. Even though the book is in stores now, it’s still so personal to me. So I’m trying different approaches. I’ll say “it’s a difficult story” or “it’s hard for me to talk about, but you can read the book.” People have been sensitive when they ask questions, and generally I am happy that nothing is a secret anymore. Secrets are heavy on the soul.
When I was in the process of working on the book, it felt like the visceral deep focus on my most painful memories started to change my reality. It felt like suddenly I could only remember the bad things, and it burdened my present. Did you feel this as well in your process? Do you feel it affected your daily life in that way?
NN: Oh, definitely. Making the book was really difficult for me mentally and emotionally, because it brought back symptoms of PTSD that I hadn't had in many years, and even some new symptoms. Now when I get triggered, it's a much more physical experience where I feel like my body is full of lead, and it's difficult to walk or move, and everything just shuts down. I definitely can't draw in that state, so I had to take lots of breaks. Even though it was really hard, I would always come back to the fact that making my book was a choice. I was choosing to dredge up the most difficult memories with the hope that doing so would make going forward easier. Trauma is always with you whether or not you're dealing with it, and so dealing with it head-on hopefully will dissipate some of the intensity for next time. Even though the book will stay a static object where the story doesn't change, my relationship to the story and my understanding of the story is going to keep changing for the rest of my life.
KS: That’s a beautiful sentence. The story doesn't change, but you do.
NN: When we first connected online, it felt like such a relief to be able to talk to someone who truly understood how intense and difficult it was to make a memoir about sexual trauma. We talked about how when we were making our books we both had people close to us tell us we didn't have to keep going if it was too much, and yet we did. I'd love to hear what drove you to keep going during the hardest moments, and what you would want to say to someone who wants to share their story, whether that’s through comics, art, writing or speaking out?
KS: I think you said it best earlier - when we don’t deal with something, it haunts us. When we do deal with it, it kind of prevents it from bothering us at the wrong moment. This whole process was about dealing - creating a space to focus on what happened, the opposite of sweeping it under the rug. In the end, no matter how hard it is, it’s better to face things on your own schedule, and not on the trauma schedule. I also knew that it would have been valuable to me to read this book as a teen or an adult, so it felt like a kind of calling to do it for others like me. This knowledge is what kept me going through all the night drawing sessions that ended with me in tears. I kept telling myself that I’m just a simple worker in all of this, like a factory worker who comes and sits down and does their part in a long production line. I felt compelled to show up for it. If I could give any advice about this process, it would be to surround yourself with people that you can trust and cry to when needed. Doing this type of work will definitely re-traumatize you, so it would be a good idea to have some kind of a cushion to the process - like therapy, like a friend, a partner, a mentor, or a good motivational podcast. It’s always good to have someone who knows you, someone who knows that you're going through a rough patch but that you don’t want to stop, because it is for your benefit even though it's difficult. And some things are difficult in life, but you will definitely reap the benefits after you finish the process. I'm so glad that I didn't stop this in the middle. Do you feel the same?
NN: Oh yeah. I definitely had to take breaks, but it was never a question for me of whether or not I would keep going. In some ways the self-destructive impulses that I had from the trauma actually worked to my benefit because I didn't have a sense of needing to be gentle with myself or to protect myself from pain. Instead, I thought, "I'm so determined to do this for reasons I can't fully articulate that I'm willing to sacrifice my well-being in order to do it." Of course, people who love you see that behavior and get concerned. But I believe only you can make the decision that you’re going to keep going, even if it appears to be harmful or self-destructive. And then when you come out the other side, it's amazing how quickly you forget how painful it was to create the book - as if it just materialized out of thin air.
KS: It's probably like having a baby.
NN: Totally, where your body forces you to forget or you’d never do it again.
KS: We both wrote these books from an urgent inner need. When you were writing this book, who were you writing it with? [A] version of a past self, or maybe a future? And now that it's done, what is your advice to Past Natalie, who’s just beginning to write this book?
NN: I definitely wrote it with my teenage self. Music is a huge way I connect to my past selves, so I would listen to playlists that I listened to at the time to get myself in that mental headspace for drawing a scene. In terms of what I would tell myself when I first started the book, I would tell her to not be afraid of the way she wanted to tell the story. While I was working I had these conflicting parts of me. The artist-self knew that I needed to do everything in hyper-detail and not censor myself at all when it came to nudity and sex. Then there’s the part of me that lives in society and has relationships with my family, and knows that for them this is going to be a difficult thing to have in the world and have people that they know reading. What I’ve learned, though, is that even though society has really intense parameters around sex and what you can talk about, I’ve found that memoir is an amazing loophole where you can really talk about and show anything. And so far I haven’t come across anyone that seems that shocked by my book. Art is a place where you are actually encouraged to be as intense and wild as you possibly can, and that’s what moves people. In the end, what’s the point of making art if you aren't pushing boundaries and breaking taboos?
KS: Couldn’t agree more.
NN: At the beginning of the book and again at the end, you talk about being ready to let these experiences go. Is this something that you feel making the comic has helped you achieve, and what does ‘letting go’ mean to you?
KS: In a way, I feel as though I did release these experiences through the book. My traumas are always with me, but they are not queued up inside of me waiting for any chance to come out anymore. Like I mentioned before, making all those connections in my mind, and explaining them to myself, really helped to remove some of the feelings of guilt and shame that were tormenting me. A traumatic experience is difficult enough to deal with, and unfortunately, guilt and shame are extras that linger alongside it. So I’m happy that they are gone from my experience. The sentence about letting go was written while I was in the middle of making the book. I was frustrated that it was taking so long and felt choked up by the flood of feelings and the crazy amount of work. When I wrote it, I felt that I was setting this intention that when I get to the finish line I would feel lighter and really put away those memories. And I think it worked.
Your book starts with beautiful words that I really connect to: “For each of you who once believed: this is just what happens to girls like me.” When do you think you understood this wasn't your fault, and what would you like to say to girls like us?
NN: It has definitely been a long process of understanding that it wasn't my fault, and I think drawing the book helped solidify this. Cognitively I knew that sexual violence is never the victim’s fault, and there's nothing that justifies that kind of violation. But at the same time, victim-blaming was deeply entrenched in me emotionally. As an adolescent I was trapped in this vicious cycle where I wanted to be wild and free, but because of that, people around me, adults and peers, treated me like I had less value. And then the shame from being perceived in that way made me reach more for drugs, alcohol and the comfort of sexual attention. That's where the idea of "girls like us" came from, I wanted to find a way to dedicate the book not just to survivors, but to really speak to the way in which so often people who experience sexual violence see themselves as different and believe that something about them causes people to hurt them. I believed that, had this happened to someone else, they definitely wouldn’t have deserved it, but because of how I saw myself at the time I couldn’t give myself that compassion. Unfortunately, predators are aware of this, and they choose people who are vulnerable and exhibit low self-worth. So I really wanted to reclaim that wild party girl identity that over the years I developed a lot of shame around.
We talk about the impact of guilt and shame, and it truly is this weight that you carry which colors everything you do. In my early 20s I got sober and radically changed the way I lived my life, but then I realized that in some ways that allowed me to continue to blame my younger self and say, “See? These things did happen because we were so out of control. Now we’re going to be good, and no one will ever hurt us again.” But at the end of the day, even if I take myself out of the equation, it doesn’t stop sexual violence from happening, because predators are still out there choosing other victims. I really hope that my book will speak to other women who also had a wild and crazy adolescence, and that it will help them to see that they weren’t the problem, and to understand that they deserve respect and safety no matter what. There's no shame in being someone who wants to live life in a more intense and sexually adventurous way.
KS: I think that you’re speaking of the permissions and messages that men get; “party when you’re young” or “be carefree and careless.” As women, we get the opposite reaction if we dare to be carefree. For us it’s “oh, she’s looking for trouble.” Many women I’ve known throughout my life didn't count their experiences as sexual assaults because they blamed themselves for being intoxicated at that moment, or for not saying “no” early enough because they were shocked. I think your book provides an important and honest point of view that will help these women to see their experiences through yours.
NN: I really hope so. Ultimately I just wanted the book to be a source of comfort to all the girls like us. It’s tempting to think that by choosing to minimize or deny your experiences you control how they impact your life, but I’ve found this couldn’t be further from the truth. Only by facing my pain and accepting that things which I couldn’t control have happened, have I been able to regain agency over my life and create something transformational which has made meaning from the suffering.
The post “Girls Like Us”: Karina Shor & Natalie Norris in Conversation about the Perils and Triumphs of Making Graphic Memoirs About Trauma appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment