It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth: This Book Is for Someone, Somewhere.

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Unlike anything I've read before. Ms. Thorogood's "auto-bio-graphic-novel" feels personal and authentic, and makes no attempt to be self-effacing. The author provides well-narrated insights into the experience of depression—insights that were enlightening, and that can help the reader be more empathetic.

That range of expression gives the story multiple emotional threads to follow, taking the form of conflicting drives warring with each other. Every avatar of Zoe (the character) has her best interest at heart, to be sure, but they all exist on different levels of emotional intelligence and disagree about what the proper steps for her actually are.Finally, in what is an important step for any book about depression, Thorogood begins her book with a warning about its content and ends it with some thoughts on how she has found some peace for herself. All in all, this is a challenging book to read that is well worth the effort and significantly less heavy and intense than the content would imply. This book is strongly recommended to anyone who enjoys the graphic arts and is ready and comfortable to read it. Moreover, the specificity with which Thorogood crafts It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth renders it a humane work. She does not claim her experience as universal, and her awareness of her perspective’s edges allows the comic to thrive on the specifics of her life, rather than try for grand sweeping generalizations of the sort that can easily become banana peels leading to open manholes. And in that specificity, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth offers its audience space for recognition. To use myself as an example, while Thor This could be useful for those who are going through something similar, but I won't be recommending it to anyone unless they are into that sort of thing. More to the point, she seemed to have an innate sense of what rules to break to tell a story her way, and not be fenced in by established conventions, which I find incredibly admirable and more rare than you might think.” Maybe I’d be dead if not for this. But instead I’m going to make something that didn’t exist before. And I think that’s beautiful.’

I know this published a while ago, but I saw it here and based on this cover, I just really wanted to read it. Ironically, I had no idea what it was about. It sat in my shelf for a little bit though because I didn't have a deadline with this one.I love how Zoe experiments with different styles throughout the book. The story flows seamlessly, despite the staccato changes in colour, layout, form, etc. It’s a great representation of the bumpy spiral-turned-whirlwind of mental illness. It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth is a deep dive into the psyche of comic artist Zoe Thorogood, and it is a beautiful, mesmerizing journey. I've read a lot of comics (and other) memoirs lately about depression, but none quite as lively and inventive as this. Faced with the knowledge that there are many such stories out there--I just read Debbie Tung's comic memoir about her depression recently)--and feeling self-conscious about her adding yet another one to the pile, she nevertheless sallies forth. But over the course of some 3200 days Thorogood faces her depression, including some suicidal ideation, exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic, and shares with us the meta-narrative of her stylistic choices. But it was only in 2019, aged barely 20, that Thorogood thought about turning her love of comics into a career. Shy and anxious, she attended a comics event in London organised by US publisher Image. She showed her portfolio and was invited to a dinner of comic creators where she met Kieron Gillen, a British writer who has worked extensively for Marvel on titles including Avengers and X-Men.