339)-and the images of her emaciated limbs and drawn face insistently remind readers that the body cannot simply evaporate.
For example, the disjunction between Katie’s self-deluding assurances-“just. In addition, the dialogic nature of the comics form allows her to discompose the boundary between mind and body by twisting their representational relationship. The psychic and literal weight of the book-well over 500 pages-is counterbalanced by her fragile linework and pared-down language. Structured around her struggles with anorexia from a childhood of picky eating to the present, Lighter Than My Shadow was initially envisioned as a prose piece, but Green later reimagined it through comics. Through its disruption of the treatment text’s generic conventions, Lighter Than My Shadow destabilizes the narrative assumptions underwriting representations of disordered eating that rely upon the body’s elision.įans of Green’s whimsical zine The Green Bean (2010–present) may be surprised, but certainly not disappointed by her darker long-form project. 82–83), but Green also chooses to tell her story through the medium of comics, an aesthetic choice that foregrounds the relationship between textual form and the corporeal body. Not only is Katie’s anorexia explicitly shown to be paralyzing to her artistic imagination and self confidence (pp. Against the conventions of its genre, then, Lighter Than My Shadow refuses romantic clichés that tie anorexia to aesthetic vision. In How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia (2013), Kelsey Osgood argues that the typical anorexia memoir-characterized by intimate first-person monologue and fragmentary poetics-feels more war story than cautionary tale, with the text serving as material proof of the author’s transcendent recovery. At first glance, British comics artist Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow seems to join an established tradition of autobiographical memoirs about anorexia, sometimes referred to as “treatment texts.” Critics have expressed uneasiness about whether this genre not-so-inadvertently glamorizes the fantasy of control, which enables the text to function as thinspiration for readers with disordered eating habits.
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