Past tense Facing family secrets and finding myself in therapy

Working through your past is part of personal growth, but it's never easy. In her memoir rife with emotional honesty, Mardou exemplifies this by illustrating her long therapy journey to come to terms with her difficult upbringing. Without sugarcoating her experiences, she presents them as stepping stones throughout her healing process, as she takes on new conflicts and characters one by one. Mardou tackles her complicated relationship with her father, dissonance with her mother, forced separation from her siblings, and how all of the above affect her as a wife and mother. Her stream-of-consciousness style reveals deep emotion at any moment, which is further supported by hand-drawn and painted illustrations. All of this results in a deeply personal yet resoundingly positive reflection of what it takes to get better and improve our relationships. Mardou's courage in sharing her experience shines through on every page, creating a reading experience that feels like catching up with a friend you wish nothing but the best for.

Mardou (Sky in Stereo) documents her therapeutic treatment in this frank and clear-eyed memoir. In 2015, 40-year-old British expat Mardou's seemingly contented life with her American husband and young daughter begins to unravel when she's wracked by intense anxiety, accompanied by bouts of acne. Though initially skeptical of therapy ("I'm British. We don't do therapy. We do sarcasm and alcoholism and football hooliganism"), she finds a skillful practitioner and begins to reconcile her suppressed memories of family traumas. These center on her complicated relationship with her Jehovah's Witness mother, who was raped by a family member at age 13; her rageful father's sexual abuse of her stepsister, Gail (for which he was imprisoned); and Gail's abuse of Mardou, when they were both young girls. Working first through cognitive behavioral therapy and later with a therapist who specializes in the internal family systems method (where one talks to the "parts" they've developed "as coping strategies to get through life," such as the "managers" who "protect our image" or the "firefighters" who "quash painful feelings via compulsions"), Mardou hopes to "break the line" of the "legacy burden" before it passes down to her daughter. Mardou convincingly charts her evolution from therapy cynic to take-charge advocate, and her sharply expressive graphics and neat lettering keep her text-heavy story fluid and immediate. The result is a potent testament to the power of reckoning with the past. Agent: Anjali Singh, Anjali Singh Agency (Oct.)

In therapy, a woman faces decades of family secrets and repressed truths. Mardou's graphic memoir begins with a scene that is difficult by any standards: She's remembering the last time she saw her now-estranged father and how, as she writes, "I felt so much ambivalence just being around him." As she goes on to reveal, Mardou's father had been imprisoned during her childhood for sexually abusing Mardou's stepsister, Gail. Mardou's stepmother reconciled with him afterward, and the two went on to have two additional children--and kept Gail a secret from them. The trauma surrounding all of this serves as the launching point for Mardou's tremendous book, in which she recounts the emotional journey she undertook, via therapy, to confront these events and heal from them. The patience with which Mardou unravels each layer of pain, betrayal, and, ultimately, forgiveness, is a marvel to behold. She is unflinchingly honest about the simple facts informing her biography and her emotional state in responding to them. Mardou traces her conversations with a pair of therapists--remarkable figures of great insight themselves--as she faces generations' worth of repressed trauma. "I've decided I'm going to take this seriously and do my homework," Mardou writes after her first therapy session. "I really need this to work. Otherwise, I'm doomed to be anxious forever." The resulting book is an inspiration not only because of Mardou's particular courage, but because of the path forward she offers readers: by consciously facing our individual hurts with patience and kindness for ourselves, she seems to say, we can learn to live as whole beings. A deeply moving story about generational trauma, healing, and growth. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.