Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Navigating fatphobia
ROSIE NELSON applauds a graphic novel that asks what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a fatphobic society?
shrink
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
Shrink
Rachel M Thomas, Graphic Mundi, £20.95
WHAT is it like to move through the world when everyone tries to change who and what you are? This is the fundamental experience that the graphic novel Shrink explores in its stylistic depiction of the author’s autobiographical experience of being fat.
The book opens with the author hospitalised. Even while lying in bed with oxygen tubes, Rachel M Thomas’s mind is racing — will people think that she’s there because she’s fat? How are others judging her? This sense of claustrophobic, understandable paranoia persists through the novel.
As Thomas shows, to be fat is to be judged. Herein lies the most interesting contribution of this book: what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a hugely fatphobic society?
More from this author
While the group known as the Colourists certainly reinvigorated Scottish painting, a new show is a welcome chance to reassess them, writes ANGUS REID
ANGUS REID recommends an exquisite drama about the disturbing impact of the one child policy in contemporary China
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
