Rating: 4/5
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Warning: This book may trigger those with depression and other mental illnesses.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a graphic novel memoir about a woman in her late 20s whose life is stymied by clinical depression, sexual repression, and her parents’ and society’s expectations. Driven to the end of her wits, the protagonist decides to call a female prostitute. The graphic novel starts with this scene, then goes back and fills in all the events leading up to it, and ends a little bit past that scene with some insights and take-aways that the protagonist learned from her experience.
The comic is monochrome with pink accents that highlight the intimacy of the narrative while appealing to the reader’s sense of cuteness. Nagata Kabi doesn’t hold back anything in this book. It can be a little jarring for the reader to have everything thrown at them at once. Still, it’s a great book, and worth reading, though it might be more triggering than therapeutic for some people (If you’re looking for something more therapeutic, I’d suggest You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. It’s amazing!).
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is embarrassingly relatable. I have a lot of the same mental issues as the main character does, including trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling). This is actually the first time I’ve ever seen trich mentioned in a book, so that was super exciting for me! And she seems to deal with it in the same way, by trying not to think about it. Trich has that Catch-22 of where the more shame you feel about it, the more you engage in that behavior as you try to calm yourself, and the more you pull, the more shame you feel, the more you pull… and on and on forever until you decide to just let it go. It’s kind of like dieting where the more you think about not eating a fudge sundae, the more you want one…
She also has depression and her insights on that are pretty accurate. In two frames near the end she shows how “die” was always an option for her at every crossroads, and how it feels like that option is grayed out when she finds a purpose in life.
The thing that made the ending not-so-satisfactory for me is that she still has an external locus of self-esteem. When her manga (this manga) gets popular on pixiv, her locus of self-esteem transfers from her parents’ opinion of her to her fans’ opinion of her. Then again, it’s one thing to say that one should have an internal locus of self-esteem and another to actually do it. This might also be a problem endemic to artists, since an artist’s work is basically a plea for acceptance and embrace. It is definitely a step up in healthiness from her parents’ expectations to her audience’s, but it’s not quite there yet and I could see it leading to problems down the road, despite her insistence at the end that everything is peachy keen.
It’s also the abrupt tone-shift that turns me off about the ending. The book is just SUFFERING SUFFERING SUFFERING and then at the end it’s like “everything is perfect now that I’m a bestselling comics artist”. Like, really? Getting published cured her depression, trichotillomania, and eating disorder? What happens if the next book isn’t successful? What about someone writes or draws a lot and is never successful… does that mean they can never be happy?
To be fair, she does also do a lot of other things to intentionally improve her mental state, like taking medication, taking better care of herself, and challenging her negative self-talk. I get the feeling that what’s really going on is that she’s not taking credit for her improvement, and giving credit to the fans instead for supporting her work. Which is nice, but give credit where credit is due. 😉
I also really related to how she describes her inability to connect with other people. When she is with the prostitute, her insecurity about her social skills paralyzes her, making her unable to ask for and receive the love she so badly needs and desires (and paid $200 for). I suspect she thinks she lacks social skills, but it might be that she’s just too sensitive to what other people think (a problem in people with high EQ). This could have caused her to be too attentive to the other person’s most minute negative reactions to be in tune with her own thoughts and feelings. It might be kind of like social OCD—you’re so worried about getting anything less than 100% that you can’t begin and so you fail.
She mentions the desire to be taken care of, like in a mother’s embrace or in a hospital. It reminded me of Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami where one of the boys talks about wanting to return to the womb. This seems like a common theme in Japanese culture. In America we value freedom and independence so strongly that desiring to return to the womb is seen as very strange.
On another interesting cultural note, Kabi says that in Japan, lesbians expect each other to dress nicely. In America, your usual picture of a lesbian is like a tomboy that wears loose jeans and flannel shirts. Kabi says she felt like she had to dress up to be attractive to lesbians.
A lot of My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness follows the evolution of her career from dropping out of college, to jobs at a grocery store and a bakery, to being unemployed long-term while submitting to new manga artist contests, to getting published and then getting success with this manga. Every time she tries to do something that’s not in tune with who she wants to be, she gets depressed and then fails. It is difficult and risky to embrace art as a career. To be an artist often means you need to depend on someone else for the basic needs of survival, and this can lead to shame and self-loathing.
Some people might ask what artists do for anyone else that’s of value. Isn’t their work isn’t just mental masturbation? Well… no. When art is good, it makes people feel seen or introduces them to something new or makes them feel something or is just something pretty to look at and enriches people’s lives. It doesn’t put food in anyone’s belly or heal the sick or correct injustice, so it can be hard to believe in these intangible goods. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat, whether the art is good or not can’t be known until it is observed by someone else. That’s why it takes a big leap of faith for an artist to produce anything at all.
Not all art has value. Bad art can have no value or it can have negative value by giving people false or harmful information. Kabi talks about how she only read yaoi manga when she was growing up and how that simultaneously felt like it made it “ok” for her to have sexual fantasies while at the same time making it difficult for her to imagine herself engaging in sexual intercourse (yaoi is male x male porn, so no women).
It’s important for artists to remember that all professions, even the most practical, carry some amount of risk. Everyone screws up sometimes. The hard part about art is that you are putting yourself into the work, so when it fails it feels like a personal failure. But the hard truth is that you just have to get over it and try anyway, no matter what people (or the nasty critic whispering in your ear) might think.
I think Kabi does a great job of talking specifically about the shame artists feel because they often have to rely on other people for financial support. Some artists might be able to thrive while holding a day job, and others might not have a choice, but if you have people that are happy to support you there’s nothing wrong with not having a “real” job outside of art.
I see “privilege” thrown around a lot as an insult, but privilege is really just a tool. Share your privilege when you can, but feeling ashamed about your privilege is useless. It doesn’t help others; it only hurts you. There was a great comic from the anarcho-communist book Work, which shows an activist white girl punching herself in the face with the caption “An ineffective way to deal with your privilege”
I’ve been struggling to find a job for a while as well, so I know her pain. I graduated college with an English degree, a deficit of self-esteem, and no car. I thought after college I’d find a “writing job” or failing that, an editing job. Both of these proved to be in very short supply and more than an hour’s commute from my city. So I applied to anything nearby without much discrimination: grocery stores, retail, admin, tutoring. I thought I would do an unrelated day job while writing and for 2 years I spent most of my time applying to jobs and stressing out and not ending up with anything to show for it.
Finally I found a gig very close to my house and it was fun for a while but it was repetitive, time-consuming and physically demanding, so after 3 years, I quit (this week!). I’m really excited to focus fully on writing again.
I’m planning to make an extensive outline and try to complete NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve participated many years… usually don’t get far past 10,000 words, but I’m hoping that this year if I have a solid enough plan I can make it happen!
If things aren’t going well in the writing department by January, I’ll try again to find a writing-related job, either as a teacher, a tutor, a copywriter, an editor… or I’ll apply for an MFA program or try some online creative writing courses.
I realize now that I should have tried harder to get into the creative writing program at my college, because studying straight English taught me how to analyze literature, but didn’t teach me how to do what I really wanted to do, which is create it. I never learned about things like plot or idea generation, etc, the creative aspects of building stories. What I did learn was more like a mechanic’s work than an artist’s: I learned how to deconstruct, to pick apart and explain each piece. I learned how to take stories apart, but I didn’t learn how to put them together.
Anyway, this was a very relatable and kind of risque book. I’d recommend it to people struggling with depression, unemployment, art careers, sexuality, and parental/societal expectations.
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