PAST TENSE

In therapy, a woman faces decades of family secrets and repressed truths.

Mardou’s graphic memoir begins with a scene that is difficult by any standards: She’s remembering the last time she saw her now-estranged father and how, as she writes, “I felt so much ambivalence just being around him.” As she goes on to reveal, Mardou’s father had been imprisoned during her childhood for sexually abusing Mardou’s stepsister, Gail. Mardou’s stepmother reconciled with him afterward, and the two went on to have two additional children—and kept Gail a secret from them. The trauma surrounding all of this serves as the launching point for Mardou’s tremendous book, in which she recounts the emotional journey she undertook, via therapy, to confront these events and heal from them. The patience with which Mardou unravels each layer of pain, betrayal, and, ultimately, forgiveness, is a marvel to behold. She is unflinchingly honest about the simple facts informing her biography and her emotional state in responding to them. Mardou traces her conversations with a pair of therapists—remarkable figures of great insight themselves—as she faces generations’ worth of repressed trauma. “I’ve decided I’m going to take this seriously and do my homework,” Mardou writes after her first therapy session. “I really need this to work. Otherwise, I’m doomed to be anxious forever.” The resulting book is an inspiration not only because of Mardou’s particular courage, but because of the path forward she offers readers: by consciously facing our individual hurts with patience and kindness for ourselves, she seems to say, we can learn to live as whole beings.

A deeply moving story about generational trauma, healing, and growth.