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?
