In Rachel Ang’s first full-length graphic novel, I Ate The Whole World to Find You, the inability to truly communicate with those closest to you – in a modern world rife with disbelieving doctors, unstable work, surveillant bosses and mundane bursts of violence – is depicted as a soul-annihilating failure.
Across five loosely related stories we follow Jenny, an Australian woman in her late 20s, through her interactions with lovers, friends and family, against evocatively drawn urban backdrops. Narrow townhouses, public swimming pools, leafy pockets of nature and Melbourne’s famous trams form the terrain of Jenny’s life, with these locales doubling as cosy spaces for gathering and sites of trauma. Often cast in shadow or sketched in impressionistic pencil, they seem to echo the protagonist’s tumultuous interior world.
Ang, adroit at dialogue, gives Jenny and her loved ones lengthy conversations in which they banter about a viral cow (“the Yao Ming of cattle”), commiserate over shit jobs and attempt to move past old wounds. Yet even with those closest to her, Jenny rarely digs into the heart of matter, instead talking around her true feelings. In the electrifying opening story, Hunger, she and her burgeoning crush sensitively debate the morality of his “feeding fetish” – only for Jenny’s feelings to be sidelined when they begin a relationship. In subsequent stories, Jenny avoids talking about her own problems while her ex-lovers vent, or she lies about her troubles at work.
Jenny’s crises of communication are evoked with blank speech bubbles that alternately swarm her uncertain face, shatter like plates or twist into noodles. Ang is a master at capturing these infinitesimal moments, where a character flinches, feels frozen, or is flooded with self-disgust.
Much of the pleasure of reading this book is witnessing Ang’s experiments in form, which often function as a cathartic release. In the novel’s fantastical centrepiece, The Passenger, Jenny’s railway day trip with her ex and his wannabe-life-coach girlfriend is derailed by a train crash – vaulting them into a hallucinogenic dreamscape. The polymorphic wackiness of this chapter showcases the absurdity of our social platitudes and Ang’s darkly comic voice. During an uncomfortable conversation in which Jenny’s ex criticises her while his girlfriend shoots off pop psychology aphorisms (“The power to change is within you!”) the three characters transform into different cartoon forms, including chess pieces, dogs, and Aardman trio Wallace, Gromit and villainous penguin Feathers McGraw (of course, Jenny feels like Gromit, the dog who cannot speak).
Through this artistic flexibility, Ang leans into the fresh possibilities of the graphic novel: creating surreal dimensions where truth can be fully unleashed, memories painfully accessed and alternative paths can be embraced.
In Ang’s comic for the Washington Post, Age of Autobiography, they write of “the manifold self” that is “molded by those around [you] – other selves, lives, impulses, now sent through the screen”, and ponder the nebulous concept of “inner self”:“Does it need to be seen to be seen and recognised? Can I live an emotionally honest life without sharing it with others?”
I Ate the Whole World to Find You appears to be a continuation of this exploration. Ang’s shifting, distorted depictions of Jenny’s physicality are a visceral expression of her incoherent self-understanding – whether it’s a carefully placed panel where Jenny is drawn with a doubling effect, or a splash page in which the detail is suddenly stripped from her face (as in the story Swimsuit, at the exact moment when Jenny witnesses a racist attack at a swimming pool). Ang’s wide-eyed, scratchy faces are often drawn very similarly; while this was initially confusing, it ultimately added to the experience, with the collection’s recurrent imagery building into a universal tapestry of fragmented identity.
It’s fitting that the cosmically themed final story, Purity, follows Jenny as she shares her body with another life, one that is wholly new: her baby. This chapter features the most rendered illustrations and fluid linework, as Jenny is able to “jettison the old, broken codes” of communication. While her conversations with her partner break down, she can speak privately to the “co-pilot” inside her, with her fears existing alongside hope. In this lovely coda, the barrier between two beings is simply a translucent veil, one that will eventually part.
I Ate the Whole World to Find You is a confronting expression of the desire to connect. In a world where it feels like speech bubbles distort and shatter as soon as they leave our mouths, Ang’s speculative vision of transcending language, and finally being understood, is potent and unforgettable.
I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang is out through Scribe ($39.99)
