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

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Some people are simply unable to experience positive emotion around personal accomplishments and creations. There's no consistency to the artwork and while this does a decent job of reflecting the muddled mind, it had a rather nonsensical feel.

Following the release of her well-received debut graphic novel, The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, Thorogood finds that artistic success is no cure for lifelong depression, which she draws as a looming Babadook-like monster. This subject matter isn't easy to talk about, because these very real thoughts process through each brain different, making you feel and do things, and it's not always easy to say why. To say I am far more interested in Zoe Thorogood’s work when it’s her own pure and unfiltered artistic vision rather than when she’s illustrating someone else’s stories would be a somewhat entitled statement.No, that sounds trite but the idea of letters colliding into a statement that will give a feeling is pretty cool at least, right? And her desire for identity, definition, self-discovery and self-understanding often tailing off into the bleakest nihilism. If you are ever looking for a book that serves as the ultimate example of comics that do things that only comics can then this should be your go-to tome.

When Thorogood’s The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott was released from Avery Hill Publishing a couple of years back it was it was undoubtedly the most confident debut graphic novel I had read since Tillie Walden’s The End of Summer a few years before. It follows the author during six months of her life as she struggles with suicidal depression, meaning that there isn’t really a storyline, as the point is to simply show what it is like in her head during that time. one of the obvious reasons that this book didn't work for me is bc it's a graphic novel and ig those are just not for me. I won’t say this book is “relatable” because everyone’s mental health journey feels incredibly personal and unique to them; though, as someone who went through an especially hard mental health year last year (and felt like my journey was the centre of the earth), I commend the author for the momentum it must have taken to create this autobiographical work and beautiful art while struggling. Zoe obviously deals with the dreaded thing of depression, worst of it the kind that makes you have suicidal thoughts.

Način na koji se naracije, likovi, stilovi, tokovi misli i radnje odvijaju i smenjuju je kao da je istresla moj mozak na papir.

Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth has affected me, I think it is marvelous, and now I am passing it along through this review that might affect you. Adverse child experiences around the self and creation socialized me in a way that will likely last for the rest of my life. The ever shifting approach in narrative presentation allows us to appreciate the story from a number of different vantage points; to act as both observer and confidante as the book progresses.Imagine if Chuck Palahniuk slipped into a bout of life-long depression and shared the experience through the drawn and written word. That Thorogood portrays all this in a graphic vernacular that we not so much read as absorb only makes it all the more powerful. For instance, she knows we have to in some sense "like" her if it is a memoir even one about such an intimate subject.

It feels like a clash between past and present, an identity crisis, and an infinite possibility scenario. This book is presented as an autobiography, and much of it is the author trying to find material to fill the book - and much of the material she finds is her own mental state. So characters' faces will be replaced with blank masks when they emotionally shut down, or at other times they might become animals, Maus-style (and turns out it's really disconcerting to see this happen with someone you actually know). Because it is self-conscious about that too, with Thorogood following up bold statements like ‘ Reading a book, hearing a song, observing a painting—that’s connection.She begins to realize her earlier work The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott is very much about creating a narrative of who she is becoming who she wants to be, while this book about writing this very book is more a look at who she is afraid she is becoming. IT’S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH is an intimate metanarrative that looks into the life of a selfish artist who must create for her own survival. Or, at a simpler but no less effective level of humour, the delight in getting hotel room number 8008, because it looks like BOOB. It made me feel a little less alone in this world but I wouldn’t encourage a friend anywhere on their mental health journey to read this because I left it mostly feeling confused. Thorogood is disparaging about her own early artistic forays, but by this point she's impressively adept, flipping between styles and media as moods shift, or sometimes combining them as a form of digression.