Whether composing letters or images, all of Delporte's lines are evocative, each color carefully chosen. When she depicts herself having sex with a lover in an attempt to become pregnant, her drawn self exists only in blue pencil and he all in orange, their lines almost but never quite touching ... central trauma permeates but does not define Delporte's work. The memoir is much more of an attempt to construct something new, even if it is necessarily incomplete and tentative as she wanders between continents and decades of memories ... The ghostly edges of transparent tape seem to hold the scissors-cut images in place. Some words are written on strips of paper, their near-whiteness almost but not quite matching the white of the book's actual paper. Several pages are reproductions of her sketchbooks, their bent corners creating a book-within-a-book illusion ... The poignantly open-ended conclusion seems the best closure possible for a memoirist still struggling to make her life work.

[Delporte's] medium throughout is colored pencils, and it’s such a wonderfully tactile material: you can see the grain of the paper in the artist’s notebooks in a way you can’t with most other mediums, especially in the digital age. It’s difficult to lose track of the fact that these images were handmade ... There’s room to breathe here. Negative space isn’t bound by tight panel grids. She mentions Louise Bourgeois at a couple points throughout the narrative, and you can actually see the influence, with swaths of minimal, almost primary color set as stark central design motifs at various points ... a monologue about life and love that never once stoops to cliche, or presumes to solve its central dilemma through any kind of pat resolution. There is none. There is instead a gradual sensation of coalescing maturity, as Delporte sifts through her own insecurities and fears in search of some way to square the circle of wanting to be an independent artistic woman who also experiences love and lust. The problem here isn’t so much that Deloporte doesn’t find An Answer, so much as there is no one-size-fits-all solution for any creative person trying to balance life and work, especially in the shadow of children and family. She doesn’t want to be alone but she also doesn’t want to die without expression. Something will probably have to give.

Delporte’s drawings are colorful, imperfect pencil sketches. The page compositions range from sparse single-images to lush, perfectly crowded pages of cities, drawing supplies, and nature scenes. It would be easy to dismiss Delporte’s work as childlike, but she actually knows the true secret of visual art: what to leave out ... exciting because it speaks aloud Delporte’s taboo personal conflicts: She’s terrified that motherhood would destroy her artistic practice, she wonders if she might be able to outgrow heterosexuality, and she often wishes she weren’t a woman. Her boldness in putting these ideas down gives hope that, though she may wander without living role models right now, Delporte may have some useful advice to the comics generation that comes after.

Seems unassuming at first. It creeps up on you with its wistful tone, delicate colored pencil drawings, and reflections on the limitations of being a woman. Gradually, the tone becomes more potent and more personal ... she considers her own physicality, but in a way that’s far removed from the romanticizing or hypersexualizing tendencies of certain male artists ... The counterpoint to all of this is Delporte’s admiration of Tove Jansson, the creator of the Finnish cartoon characters Moomins...But Delporte spells out the appeal — possibly too much, as this doesn’t leave much space for readers to spot connections ... gets a charge about two thirds of the way through, when Delporte’s sadness is finally transmuted into anger.

[A] melancholy meditation on art, femininity, and longing. Delporte has lived a life scarred by sexual assault, degradation, and diminishment on the basis of her gender—but she also celebrates moments touched by bliss. This contradictory reality, rendered here in vibrant, feathery pencils and inks, will be familiar to many women readers ... Delporte’s confident linework is at once soft—beachy blues, rumpled fabric—and almost cruelly stark. By the final page, Delporte has shared no easy answers. But the cumulative effect of her work lands soft as a child’s whimper and as strong as a heroine’s laugh.