Recent reviews of JustFocus have focused on action books, but comics are also a great means of intimate expression. Moi en double, recently released by Delcourt, is proof of this?
Grossophobia
Moi en double is the new comic by Navie, the screenwriter of Horizontal Collaboration. This story is the first comic by the cartoonist, Audrey Lainé. The opening of this book is striking: on the edge of a swimming pool in summer, his son gets dangerously close to a swimming pool. She sees him but because of his weight she fears she won't make it in time to stop him from falling into the pelvis. This moment is decisive for Navie because we will follow her fight against overweight. In front of the others, Navie masks her pain with joie de vivre. Through different thematic chapters, the author gradually reveals himself and exposes his pain. Navie has been undergoing for years the cycle of diets and nutritionists without obtaining a real result. He is insulted in the street – "because I'm fat, you couldn't say no". She asks the right questions – should we tell someone who has grown fat or say nothing out of cowardice? How to draw pain? The text seeking to convey the universality of the struggle is sometimes naïve – "Life is a dense forest that sometimes does according to what one crosses"
Story of a struggle to be in tune with herself
The reader will find little humor but the screenwriter unvarnished the tragedy of her life – a childhood under a permanent regime by a phobic mother of weight and depression at 18. Sick, Navie diagnoses herself with hyperphagia. This legal addiction is, according to her, intended to lose oneself in the satisfaction that the product provides. You feel your frustration at not being able to connect with your body. The pain following an operation pushed him to write this comic.
She and herself
A nutritionist tells her that she carries the weight of another person and so she imagines a double in her. This double reassures her or pushes her to eat depending on the situation. To tell these intimate sufferings, Audrey Lainé uses a black and white pencil drawing except for touches of red, double of which. The drawing seems unfinished as the search for the author and raw as suffering. Lainé multiplies the effects with varied layouts from grid to full-page.
Throughout the reading, I was surprised by the very dark tone. This very screen-centered story manages to become universal. He conveys to us the difficulty of living: "The excess weight concerns everyone whether it is on the stomach or in the heart". However, in wanting to share this situation, Navie sometimes becomes moralistic and very alarmist. We also feel that the screenwriter still has a lot to say as shown by a page on her intimate life – the free couple, the pressure on education …
