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

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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. Thorogood’s courageous honesty is supported by her hilarious deadpan humor and then tied all together by her absolutely insane artistic vision. Occasionally there will be an interesting part, like where she is terrified of tabling at a convention and then gets more comfortable with it, and she can draw really well, she just doesn’t do it often. I am polite and appropriate when people compliment or admire me, I hold the intellectual knowledge of their intentions, which are good and pro social.

I was recently lying near death in the ICU and I was extremely comforted by how I have spent my time and the work I leave behind. 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. This is where It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is at its most triumphant as a piece of comics craft.It's an excellent visual representation of depression and self-pity because there's no logic to it and it's incredibly self-absorbed.

This is a highly self-conscious book, capturing the very human inner contradictions and inner dialogues we all face, particularly during moments of self-doubt. In this autobiographical graphic novel, creator Zoe Thorogood offers an honest look at what her depression feels like and how it affects her life and her relationships with others. Mostly just as an ‘I was here’ but also to hopefully have someone pause, read, and be touched by poetry even for only a moment.It’s a baffling phenomenon; the unwanted offspring of an unhealthy union between obscene privilege and a performative rejection of empathy. I want to say that It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood is a bit quirky and unorthodox but it's just fascinating. A poignant and original depiction of a young woman's struggle with mental health―through the ups and downs of anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome―as she forges a promising career in sequential art and finds herself along the way. I don't know if she'll ever read this or not, but for anyone struggling with the feeling of wanting to stay alive, please reach out to someone, even a stranger. Thorogood has had, albatross-like, this label hung around her neck, and probably not very helpfully for someone at the start of her career.