Graphic novel of the monthBooksReviewA New Yorker cartoonist’s candid search for selfhood offers solace to anyone who feels different from othersThe New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck calls her graphic memoir a “neurological coming-of-age story”, and it’s true that one thread running through her tender, complicated narrative has to do with a certain kind of difference: Finck has often found it hard to bond with other people, and she suffers from an anxiety that is, at times, debilitating. But there is much more to her story than this. For one thing, she isn’t much interested in labels such as Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, finding them in her own case more restrictive than liberating. For another, her book is also about love, family, creativity and the quest for selfhood – in other words, with stuff that concerns us all. If reading it makes you think long and hard about neurological difference and the isolation it may involve, it also reminds you that we all feel weird at times – as if we are, as she puts it, only passing for human.
As a child, Leola, whom we understand to be a version of Liana, avoids other children, preferring to find some quiet corner of the playground where she can commune with insects and even rocks; as a teenager, she finds herself at the very bottom of the school social hierarchy. She struggles with jokes and authority, and her behaviour is often mistaken for wilful naughtiness.
Is this condition inherited? Certainly, this is something her doctor father worries about, seeing in his daughter’s eyes an otherness he recognises – and her architect mother, too, is a dreamer and a spinner of fantasies. But where her parents’ difference manifests itself as creativity and drive, leading them to heal the sick and to build marvellous houses, for Leola it manifests itself mostly as a burden. She doesn’t draw because she enjoys it, or even because she is good at it, but because it makes up for something she feels she lost a long time ago. Except that it doesn’t always: stepping out of her own story, Finck begins her narrative again and again, doubts about where it should rightly begin crowding in. The negative voices in her head she draws as rats, perched on her shoulders.
This book comes with a lot of whimsy: shadows that walk and talk; a god that is a queen on a cloud; a heroine who believes the food she leaves outside a tiny model of her childhood home is being eaten daily by the (absent, lying) lover who made it for her. Her biblical-mythological interludes don’t always work. Somehow, though, this doesn’t matter – and not only because it’s impossible not to admire both her ambition and the beautiful economy of her line drawings (they remind me so much of the poet Stevie Smith’s).
There is a resonant truth at the heart of this book, and it soars above everything else, however distracting; it has to do with life, and all the loneliness it involves. Even as she strains to express her feelings, Finck offers solidarity to those willing to go with her. So, you feel strange, she tells us. Sometimes, you fear you’ll cross a line, get caught out, be revealed as less than human. But this is OK. Take a look around. There are others just like you, zipped into their skins, walking about on two legs for all the world as if life were just a rose-scented breeze.
Passing for Human by Liana Finck is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.33 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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