Really lovely piece of memoir.As an aside: The book isn't available in my library system, so I asked my mother to check it out for me at her library, along with several other b. Green's art is clean but detailed it works. And I think she's done a wonderful job of that here - she writes with a lot of perspective, showing both how her thoughts were impacting her life and what that looked like from the outside.I'm always cautious with graphic novels and memoirs art style makes such a big difference in my experience as a reader. 2017.Review 1: Right before I read this, I came across an interview with Green on the BBC one of the things she said was that, at one point during her eating disorder, she tried drawing it for her parents to help them understand what it was like to be in her head. A brave and wonderful message of hope in the face of the darkness of your own mind. I was moved to tears at her “breakthrough” moment. Ultimately, it’s a map through one person’s recovery, and a demonstration of how she chose it. others’ perceptions of us, self-control and dedication, and the quest for perfection. It can also be about the conflict of the perception of ourselves vs. It’s not always about being skinny, as Katie shows us. But it does give us a first-hand account into anorexia, an oft-misunderstood and deadly mental illness. Lighter Than My Shadow is not an easy book to read. The most harrowing illustrations are those of a close-up of Katie in the throes of a difficult moment, the black scribbles closing in on her. It makes her mental illness a real, physical character in the story as much as Katie and her family are. If you look close enough, you can pick out words: mean names and feelings that her illness would call her. Katie’s negative thoughts are portrayed by dark, dense clouds of scribbles. Each and every illustration was drawn by hand, in what looks to be ink. Though she’s admitted to therapy multiple times from high school throughout college by her family and friends, Katie ultimately has to choose recovery for herself. Her feelings of inadequacy are squashed by self-control and dedication – to her schoolwork, her appearance, and starving her body to the right shape.

Everything around her is changing so rapidly, and Katie feels she has to be perfect in everything. She is bullied, and she binges when she comes home upset. Her relationship with food grows worse as she enters high school. Soon she developed a ritual for herself, where everything had to be cut the same size, chewed a certain number of times… her parents showed no concern, as lots of children develop their own way of doing things. Katie always had a difficult relationship with food, even when she was a little girl.

Lighter than my shadow