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.
