Siobhán Gallagher is a Canadian cartoonist who has done work ranging from choose-your-own-adventure style critiques of the daily grind, to reflective journals, as well as being a humor contributor to The New Yorker. Her illustration work has been featured in Us Weekly and The Huffington Post, and she is the recipient of the Society of Illustrators Silver Medal of Excellence.
In her latest graphic novel, Full of Myself, Gallagher presents a personal, thoughtful autobiography that focuses on body image, depicted both her own life and as commentary on how women are seen in society today.
In the following interview, Gina Gagliano talks with the artist about her latest book, Full of Myself.
GINA GAGLIANO: Can you talk a little about the process of making this memoir? It encompasses so much of your life—how did you figure out how to condense it into this book?
SIOBHÁN GALLAGHER: When it came to condensing my life into a book, I divided it into four sections: childhood, high school, young adulthood (college and early-twenties), and my twenties and onward. The whole process took a lot longer than I’d anticipated—I began sketches and toying around with ideas for the book in 2018, spent 2020 putting together the outline and book pitch, and then I wrote and drew the whole book from 2021-2023.
My process was not advisable! It included taking lots of little breaks that I didn’t expect would be necessary, but emotionally I needed. I’d work on it for a bit, then take space away from it, then return to it, or go to another chapter, then take some time away.
Full of Myself really focuses on body image. How did you decide that was an overarching theme of your life you wanted to make comics about?
You’re told that you should write what you know, and to write a graphic memoir, I had to face the thing I knew most intimately: distorted body image. Of course, anything related to my body image was always the last thing I wanted to think about or talk about, but over the years, hearing and reading from other women I admire about their experiences with disordered eating opened my eyes to just how many other amazing, inspiring people are also dealing with what I've dealt with, and helped me feel less alone and also furious on their behalf that they’ve felt this way.
Growing up, I’d always wanted to write a book about my life but I used to wonder, “What made me special enough for others to want to read about me?” I eventually realized that it was what made me so non-special that I had to talk about. I never thought of my main identity being, “someone with an eating disorder”, but that identity was with me whether I liked it or not for almost my whole life, and to talk about my life meant addressing that. When you learn you’re not alone in a secret you’ve kept for so long, you want to let others know they don’t need to hold those secrets either.
Writing about body image in every age of your life builds an all-encompassing picture of how much women are constantly overwhelmed by depictions and messages of what our bodies should be like at all times! Did you find it overwhelming to work on, too?
Yeah, it was definitely overwhelming! It’s one thing to experience 90s and early 2000s diet culture personally, but then to go back and reflect, research, summarize, and illustrate it, I felt like I was reliving a lot of the misogyny and body shame I spent so long trying to escape.
You’re the main character in your graphic novel about body image, and your image is on just about every page! How did you come to a decision about how to draw yourself? Was that a big challenge?
Kind of like how my body image and perception of self have changed, my self-portraits have evolved over the past decade and I feel like the “me” I draw now is the right “me.” I introduce the book with a narrative disclaimer that I was much more comfortable drawing myself than I was going out and being myself, and that I also wanted to represent myself “accurately” in case the reader judges me.
One challenge was figuring out how to visually distinguish my current narrator self and my past selves to the reader, and luckily in 2022 I got bangs and that became the perfect differentiator between past and present.
Also, the book is called Full of Myself, so you can’t say you weren’t warned!
In Full of Myself, you talk a lot about your tough personal experiences—depression, cutting, and eating disorders. Was it a challenge to become comfortable with sharing these difficult parts of your life in your stories?
It was definitely weird knowing that people would read about my darkest secrets, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I used to worry that I would be seen as weird or gross but through sharing my comics and art online, I’ve come to realize that a lot of my anxieties and fears are the same as so many other people. Everyone has their issues and I wanted to share my own in hopes that others may shed some of that fear of judgment. Sharing feels a lot better than hiding.
You talk a lot about the competing love/relationship myths ‘you’ll only find love when you are perfect’ and ‘your life will become perfect only when you find love.’ Can you talk about how these influenced your life?
I feel like I delayed a lot of happiness, limiting myself to what I thought I “should” be rather than learning who I was for myself. Believing that I couldn't be accepted as I was prevented me from more life experiences I wish I'd had (from dates to social interactions to just being comfortable with myself in public). Maybe I would have learned sooner that there is no "perfect" self, and even if I try to become that idealized version of that, I will never be happy with my physical self if I don't work on my interior life first.
As a person who kept a childhood diary, I love how you included segments from your own journals in this book. What was the process of going back through them to write this memoir like?
I read through them all, taking pictures and notes of certain pages and drawings.They were kind of heartbreaking to go through. Enough time had passed between who I was when I wrote in those diaries and who I am now, so I read through them feeling really sad for this girl. After disassociating for a wee bit, I went through my pictures and made a list of significant moments from my diaries, noting the dates, passages, and what themes they could be categorized under (friends, work, crushes, etc.). I then went through these noted moments, looked for patterns in the stories, which ones should be isolated and made into comics, which I could write about more generally, and what doesn’t fit at all.
When talking to AIGA, you said, “I have found it personally therapeutic to draw and write about my own anxieties as a way to figure out how I really feel about things.” Can you talk about how that came into play with the tough topics you talk about in this book?
I’ve always loved using art to decipher my emotions and putting my memories and feelings into a visual creation. Drawing and writing has become a safe space for me to work my shit out, and in working on this book, I was able to pinpoint the moments of my life that haunt me and address them in my own way. I’ve heard that “the mentionable is manageable” and drawing all the things I never wanted to mention to anyone before was really healing. I wrote and drew a lot that aren’t in the book, like I had to at least get them out of me and release them.
Do you have advice for people struggling with body image?
No one is as concerned about your body as you are (and if they are: that’s on them, not you). I know it’s all easier said than done, but you should enjoy your body how you want to, not how others think you should!
Your previous books, In a Daze Work and Who Do You Think You Are? have been more workbook-slash-social commentary than memoir. What was it like to move to this new kind of story?
It was way more freeing than I expected. My first two books were about more broad human experiences and were meant to resonate with a more general audience, but working on a graphic memoir kind of gave me permission to be more vulnerable. I really believe the saying that the personal is universal, so even though this book is more specific and niche in subject matter, it’s much more relatable than my first two books.
Tell us about your art process! What tools do you use to make comics?
Full of Myself was drawn and colored digitally on my iPad using Procreate. I knew from the start that it would be digital because a) I have carpal tunnel and that’s easier on my wrist, and b) I simply do not have the space or brain capacity to have done it on paper. That’s so much paper! Otherwise, I have a sketchbook that I do daily drawings in because I still love and appreciate good old-fashioned pen (Staedtler pigment liner 0.2) to paper (Emilio Braga stitched notebook).
I love all your full-page illustrations of outfits by era, diaries, movies, and emotions! Can you talk about how you approach making those? (And how do you remember all the fashion choices of your younger selves?) Did your background as a designer play into your choices here?
I did a lot of visual research through my personal archives. I scanned a lot of old family photos so I had a lot of childhood Y2K fashion references and decor to pull from, along with diary pages of drawings I made of outfits, magazine clippings, and things I’d print from the internet on the family printer as a teen at home. All of my memories are punctuated by the fashions or aesthetics surrounding them, and I love incorporating those nostalgic pop cultural references into my comics because it gives more context to my life and my world at the time.
You have such great typography throughout the book! I especially love how you illustrated ‘beautiful’ on page thirteen. Can you talk about how you thought about fonts vs. hand-lettering vs. designed lettering while making this book?
As a designer, I love injecting as much personality as I can into things that could otherwise be banal. I didn’t want to overdo it and take away from other visuals so I was intentional with when to be playful in my hand-lettering. I turned my handwriting into a font, which (with the exception of one panel with text from news outlets) was the only one used in the book. All text is hand-drawn because I wanted to share a world entirely from my perspective and little things like handwriting make it feel that much more intimate.
That illustrated “beautiful” on page thirteen was inspired by the playful lettering from the title page of The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food, a little nod to a childhood favorite.
What are some of your favorite comics memoirs?
I love everything Julie Doucet has done, but especially My New York Diary. Vanessa Davis’ Make Me a Woman, Kate Beaton’s Ducks, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel are also favorites.
What are your thoughts about 10 Things I Hate About You, if you ever saw it after that childhood sleepover experience?
My mom wouldn’t let me watch it when I was eleven or so but I finally saw it later as a teen and loved it! Heath Ledger singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”! Iconic.
The post “It was definitely weird knowing that people would read about my darkest secrets”: An interview with Siobhán Gallagher appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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