Booklife Review

Marseille's graphic memoir exploring her experiences with sexual desire, body image, guilt, and shame is funny, intimate, and often achingly sad. Speaking directly to the reader through a stand-in drawn with a friendly, appealing cartoony look, Marseille opens the book by declaring that she's going to talk frankly about sex as a way of helping reduce the shame, guilt, and stigma that so often compromises such discussions. “I’m really putting myself out there!” she says, and to demonstrate the point in the next panel her baggy jeans and heart-emblazoned t-shirt are gone, the nudity matter-of-fact and touchingly human. By laying herself bare, she says, she hopes her stories will help others feel better about “sex and everything that comes with it.”

In a wide-ranging chronology that starts with her birth, Marseille establishes how her parents' split and her father's subsequent establishment of a new family led to a lifetime of anger, abandonment, and daddy issues. From there, her discovery of porn and subsequent guilt for watching established another set of behaviors that became hard to shake. Marseille has to deal with the reality of learning she was sterile at a young age, an abusive early lover, coming to terms with her own desires, sexually transmitted disease, and the joys and complexities of her first long-term relationship. That ends when she eventually realizes that she's drawing all of her validation from someone else.

Here, she draws, literally, a more thoughtful and moving sort of validation, though she doesn’t always find easy answers. The book concludes with a poignant sequence where Marseille is confronted by her childhood self, who is tired of being hated by her older self. There is an attempt to comfort her and forgive herself, but it's clear that this particular wound is too fresh to fully heal. Readers interested in comic but vulnerable graphic memoirs will relish Marseille's charming but unflinching cartooning and painfully intimate accounts of one young woman grappling with both desire and shame.

Takeaway: Touching, vulnerable graphic memoir of grappling with sex and shame.

Comparable Titles: Sweeney Boo’s Eat, and Love Yourself, Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A