01/08/2024
Delporte (This Woman’s Work) reckons with sexuality, identity, and belonging in this searching and intimate graphic memoir. Detailing the realization of her own lesbian identity at age 35 in soft-pencil cursive and full-page drawings, Delporte interrogates her past relationships (“The whole game is rigged”), grapples with the enduring toll of sexual traumas, and bemoans “compulsory heterosexuality” (per Adrienne Rich). Throughout, she confronts nagging worries over queer authenticity (“I was afraid of having to perform my new sexuality to be accepted”). As she lays bare her insecurities and anxieties in concise ruminations, she cites the many artists and theorists (including Chantal Akerman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rich) who’ve helped her make sense of the world. Probing lines of text snake between drawings of vulvar flowers, agate slices, lichen, film stills, and lovers in repose. There’s an intuitive cast to the interplay of calm, bright images and often-restless confessions, while the discreet “pencil swatch” color tests scribbled at the margins of many pages underscore the artist’s enduring interest in process—and her recognition that each person remains an ongoing work in progress. “Time hasn’t healed all my wounds,” Delporte writes, “and yet here I am, still very much alive.” The result is a poignant, sometimes tortured, but ultimately hopeful study. (Jan.)
Reading this portrait of a body is like being whispered to all night (by someone you love) while looking at a wonderful procession of images shot fleetingly against a darkened wall. She speaks to the aloneness and togetherness at once. It's ardently alive.” —Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls
“Queer liberation comes in many ways and Julie Delporte delicately writes about the subtleties of this experience and the process of beginning to accept a body that you once rejected. It is a beautiful, candid book that softly extrapolates how we can begin to love ourselves and others again.” —Fariha Roisin, Who is Wellness For?
“Incredibly powerful... Delporte explores what it means to be in a queer body in a patriarchal society, the changing nature of desire, embodiment after trauma, and so, so much more.” —Andrea Richards, Shondaland
“Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms.” —Daniella Fishman, The Millions
“Bathed in hues of blue and brown, her watercolor images and line-drawn pictures beautifully compliment her journey from yearning girl to a fully realized, content, and life-affirming queer woman.” —Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter
“An artistic confessional of identity, sexual deliverance, and self-acceptance.” —Kirkus
“Delporte (This Woman’s Work) reckons with sexuality, identity, and belonging in this searching and intimate graphic memoir.” —Publishers Weekly
“Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms.” —The Millions
01/26/2024
This book is a diary, a travelogue, and a thought exercise in the pursuit and practice of a lesbian identity. Delporte considers her own journey from compulsory and sometimes traumatic experiences with men to naming that disappointment and working to define her sexuality outside of that. She tracks her journey as a woman, as a feminist, as an artist gravitating to lesbian artists (memorably Moomin cartoonist Tove Jansson) and as a woman who celebrates her own body and aesthetic and sensual form. Wisely and quietly, her exploratory texts are bordered by soft, even dreamy, colored pencil sketches of some of the creative women she admires and their work, as well as observational drawings of curving, sloping feminine forms in nature—shells, moss, mountains, berries, and wildflowers. Delporte's queer journey is specific to her own life, and this book feels like a meditative labyrinth rather than a memoir with sharp resolution. Perhaps the most impressive choice she makes is to situate her story within the essential context of feminist and lesbian artists who helped her see herself more clearly—both in salient quotes and visual homages. VERDICT Moody, elegant, slow, and serious, Delporte's self-portrait feels defined in great part by its beautiful, formidable frame.—Emilia Packard
2023-11-28
A queer woman narrates the evolution of her sexuality, womanhood, and capacity for love in this graphic memoir.
“Time hasn’t healed all my wounds and yet here I am, still very much alive,” writes Canadian artist Delporte at the beginning of this exploration of her journey as a “late-life lesbian.” Her expressive prose makes copious references to books by Annie Ernaux, Dorothy Allison, and Lauren Berlant, as well as such provocative films as Chantal Akerman’s 1975 cult classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which depicts a widowed housewife’s mundane routine spiced up by sex work (and murder). The author admits to episodes of unwanted sex with men, considering it “the price I paid for a bit of affection.” Later, she would “come to call what happened an inadvertent rape.” To cope with these ordeals, Delporte sought out psychotherapy in her later years, and she also dealt with disassociation and extended respites from intimacy. In cursive text featuring tender poetic declarations and line drawings in both colored pencil and watercolor brushstrokes, the author/illustrator describes her gradual emergence as a lesbian: cutting her hair, changing her dress code, and feeling liberated from the “demands” of conventional femininity. She began a punk rock band, channeled French philosopher Monique Wettig and Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson, and fell in love with a woman with whom “for the first time, there was space for my trauma when we had sex.” Delporte’s eye for artistry shines throughout both the text and illustrations, and her evocatively resonant watercolors illustrate her deeply felt sexual trauma, her insecurities and early trepidations about her queer inclinations, and, in pages bathed in vibrant swaths of intermingling colors, her most intimate desires. Delporte’s memorable artwork brims with vitality and authenticity.
An artistic confessional of identity, sexual deliverance, and self-acceptance.
