Review: Blossom and Bones by Kim Krans
Front cover ‘Blossoms and Bones’ by Kim Krans available March 2020.
Kim Krans is known as the artist of the Wild Unknown Tarot but here she returns for a raw telling of her recovery from disordered eating through drawing.
We hosted Kim back when ‘Blossoms and Bones’ first came out, and this review got lost in our processing of her talk afterwards. The book remains timely and we still recommend it for anyone who is interested in memoir and re-imagining the act of making a graphic memoir.
The blurb reads, “After cancelling her flight home to wellness-obsessed Los Angeles, where Krans had been secretly experiencing a debilitating eating disorder, she finds her way to an ashram and seeks spiritual and creative refuge. For forty days she relies on “drawing the feeling” as a way to realign her relationship to food, addiction, fertility, perfectionism, and the endless messaging of “never enough” echoing throughout current culture. She makes the ashram her home and embarks on the healing process through intricately hand-drawn narration of both her inner and outer worlds, cancelling forthcoming high-profile teaching obligations and international travel. Radical simplification, meditation, community, and creativity bring her through the darkest chapter of her life.”
Krans embeds the process in the narrative of the book. Image source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B7_Y5mNHyK3/
The book that emerged from this practice of drawing every day is a unique contribution to the growing list of graphic memoirs. Krans does a wonderful job at situating the reader and tapping a direct line to her internal experience. She’s honest with the reader, explaining that she has no plan for this process: there’s no plan for this story you’re reading, where it started or where it’s going. She embeds that journey into the narrative, detailing her thought process, her confusion, the moments of deep intensity as she sorts through her past and it’s impact on her present and the future before her.
This is familiar ground for memoir, think of Alison Bechdel writing her conversations about making the book with her mother in ‘Are You my Mother?’ or Art Spiegelman pouring his internal reckoning and artistic process into ‘Metamaus’. What is so radical in the case of Krans, is this working without a plan, of sitting down with the intention to make something but with no expectation about the outcome. In the tradition of automatic writing in prose, this drawn stream of consciousness tests the boundaries of what makes a comic. And it is powerful reading for anyone with a creative practice.