Blossoms and Bones

November 18, 2019
A combination diary and sketchbook, Krans’s depiction of her 40 days spent at an ashram recovering from an eating disorder, divorce, and multiple miscarriages is raw and, for anyone who’s wrestled the demons of perfectionism, intensely relatable. Krans gives herself the task of “drawing the feeling,” even as narrative and distraction try to lure her away. The ruthless internal voice that is undoubtedly responsible for some of Krans’s self-sabotage (binge eating and torpedoing professional and personal relationships) makes for a rigorous co-narrator, coupled with a deeper, more nurturing voice. “I want to draw this,” she says, next to an arrow pointing to a moonlit mountain, “not this”: a skeleton huddled atop a pile of “piss, shit, food, tears.” But eventually she embraces a “both and” mentality, represented by a bouncy, shifting “pair of dimes” (get it?). Full of white space, black space, scribbles, and charts, Krans’s work literally pushes the boundaries of the page. The result is vulnerable and experimental, though some readers may grow impatient with, for example, six pages of the words thank you. But in a moment where self-love messages are often glib, Krans’s attempt is enjoyably messy.

November 15, 2019
A graphic memoir that seems to capture the artist in the midst of a nervous breakdown. This book is not easy to read, partly because Krans (The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook, 2019, etc.) was in the throes of such a painful period in her life, struggling with a persistent, pernicious eating disorder along with related psychological and spiritual crises; and partly because the structure of the text and illustrations consistently resist attempts to read it in a linear fashion, with so many words often going in so many different directions that it can prove difficult to read them all and to digest what has been read. All of this seems to be intentional; Krans writes that her artistic aim was to maintain a raw graphic sketchbook while dealing with the eating disorder. "I could not recognize my body, my thoughts, or my actions," writes the author. "Nor could I control them." For a stretch of 30 days that turned into 40, she committed herself to "drawing the feeling," which she "tried to do with all the courage I could muster." Her feelings were urgent and all over the place, and the text reflects this immediacy. The author chronicles the lure of and resistance to food, elaborate dream sequences, films that she conjured in her head, and the prayers that helped her work toward healing. There are long lists of Google searches and things she was thinking about while writing and drawing her journal. There are explosions of thoughts that scatter across the page and that occasionally require readers to turn the book sideways to try to make sense of them. The frenzied illustrations sometimes overwhelm as the author pursues the darker depths of her psyche in search of wholeness. Krans seems to have emerged feeling somewhat hopeful, and readers will feel that they have been through something as well.

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January 1, 2020
Children's book author and illustrator Krans made this drawing journal (to which she added an introduction but otherwise only barely edited) over a one-month period in the spring of 2019. Spurred by an upsetting spiral into disordered eating in her late thirties, she cancelled a five-day workshop she was to lead and instead checked into an ashram in the Poconos to "draw the feeling." Her dated, black-and-white entries are loaded with text, much of it difficult conversations with herself. Early on, Krans introduces an alter ego of sorts, a rather cute skeleton dwelling in a dark and cluttered psychic basement. Halfway through, a spread reveals a previous attempt covered in black ink, minus the words "I CAN'T MAKE THIS BOOK (IT'S A COMPLETE MESS)." Also revealed are more of the painful truths behind how she's arrived here. Krans communicates far beyond the text, too, using drawing and lettering styles that range from precise and elegant to sketchy and unsettling. Readers who surrender to the hallucinatory feel and flow of this will be rewarded.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)