SPELLBOUND

A tricky graphic meta-memoir about levels of profound transition—personal, professional, and creative.

This is a story about writing a book and the steps that Som took along the way in her transition from architect to hopeful author/illustrator. However, that wasn’t the most significant change the author experienced, as she details from an oblique perspective how she became a transgender artist. “Loath to draw myself,” she writes, “…I substituted Anjali, a cisgender Bengali-American woman in place of yours truly into these recollections.” The author proceeds to chronicle her life story through the voice of Anjali. Throughout, Anjali struggles with issues of both identity and gender confusion—e.g., being mistaken for a boy during an adolescent goth phase, she wonders, “What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t a gay boy but I didn’t feel quite straight either.” She earned a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard, left her job over a dispute about health insurance, and devoted herself to her vocation of comics while occasionally supporting herself with architectural drawings. She traveled with her parents to India and, later, endured the deaths of her mother and then father. All the while, she was badgered by relatives to “find a nice Indian boy and get married.” Eventually, Anjali encountered a trans woman whose experience influenced her own, and she explored same-sex relationships without feeling the need to define herself as one way or the other. With a mixture of cartoon-bubble dialogue, boxed passages of narration, and full-color illustrations that show the precision of the drafting table and the meticulous approach of the author, Som and her creation seem to merge at the end, with the declaration, “after half a century…being at sea, I finally kind of know who I am.”

A rewarding narrative that presents identity as a puzzle for everyone to solve.