It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

This is all true, as far as I know. Zoe Thorogood says this book is the story of six months in her life, as filtered through her own head. But everything everyone ever sees or knows is filtered through their heads, so that's reality as best we know it, always.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is the name - I guess you'd call it a graphic novel, since it's in comics format. Or maybe a comics memoir, or graphic non-fiction.

I suspect it's vastly more carefully constructed and conceived than it seems to be: the best works of art always have a lot of prep-work and invisible details. Centre of the Earth says it's the comics pages that Thorogood made during this stretch of time, to be a GN memoir, to chronicle an expected trip from her native England to the US for the first time.

She also says, up front, that she wants it to be a positive story, a particular kind of story - one of those "learn to live with yourself" stories, the kind with a quirky girl who gets better.

If this were a movie, the audience would leave the cinema feeling fine, maybe bordering on pleasant. But this isn't a movie - and I've been considering stabbing myself in the neck with a sharp knife.

Her previous GN was that kind of story, fictional. It got good reviews. Thorogood sees the parallels. She doesn't explicitly say why this new book is autobiographical, but Center of the Earth is all about art. She cares a lot about making art: drawing comics pages, telling stories, turning her own pain and confusion into something better and maybe, just maybe, getting one of those quirky-girl endings for herself along the way.

It's not impossible, right? If you treat your life as a story, and tell that story really well, you can get the right ending, can't you?

How Thorogood works through that is what happens in Center of the Earth. She doesn't talk about any particular diagnosis - I get the sense that institutions have not done well by her, that whatever peace and balance she's found has been hard-fought, and not aided by medication or therapy or diagnoses, even as a reader suspects any or all of those things, done right, would be hugely positive for her.

Call it depression, I guess, if you need a name to hang on it. Suicidal ideation at times. Thorogood draws it as a grinning tall devilish figure, mostly a dark silhouette with what looks like a frozen mask for a face. It's there a lot of the time, lurking around the edges of a lot of these pages. That's what it's like: it's always there, somewhere, sometimes more prominently than others. Whispering to her, saying unpleasant things she can't unhear.

Thorogood draws herself many different ways: there's a realistic version of herself, at her current age, that is more or less the "protagonist" of the book. But there are also younger Zoes, at several ages. There's also a cartoony-headed version that takes over page-space for long stretches - I think the cartoon version is the maker of comics and the realistic one is the character in the story, since they interact with each other.

All of the versions of Thorogood interact with each other. At times it's a little cluster of Zoes, though, as you might expect from someone this hermetic and lonely, they're not much of a support group.

The pages circle those core concerns: living the story, telling the story, constructing the story. Living in the world, the way she wants or can, the way the world wants her to, the way maybe she can get to someday. Planning for that big trip, having it cancelled once, planning again, finally going.

I'm making this sound messy and complex, but it isn't. It's organic and straightforward and personal. It's Zoe Thorogood's story, told by all of the Zoe Thorogoods. It doesn't quite go the way she wants it to, and that's a large part of what Center of the Earth is about: what you want, what you get, what you make of it.

Her art is inventive and quick and supple, changing modes and styles within individual panels and mixing up levels of representation all the time. I've never seen her work before, but she has some serious art chops, and brings thought and skill and insight on every page to tell this story in the strongest, deepest way she can.

Centre of the Earth is masterful and moving; there's a moment a few pages from the end that nearly made me tear up. I hope that all of the positive things are true and that all of the negative things are overstated; I wish Thorogood all of the happiness in the world and a long career making books just as surprising and magnificent as this one.