It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

Which, to be fair, is a primary theme of this book. The art is fantastic, pivoting between styles and alternating between bright colors to black and white ink frames in a way that feels akin to the ups and downs of moods when struggling with depression.

This isn’t a light read, but Thorogood blends the harsh introspections with gallows humor and slapstick fun that keeps this bouncing forwards and impossible to put down. Sure, it might be a little over-the-top at times but that’s what makes it work-it pushes everything just a little too far because that zone is where magic is made. It is a controlled mess, one that is certainly well thought out but reads naturally. There is a frenetic energy that roars forward through this highly metafictional memoir experiment that would feel twee or already well-trodden in lesser hands but becomes this incredible work that feels just as messy and lovely as real life should be. This is an exciting and wild ride through some heavy territory with a chaos of artistic styles (all of them extraordinary) and stories that form a larger portrait that feels pretty damn…human. What we are gathered for here today is to celebrate Zoe Thorogood and It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, her marvelous ‘ auto-bio-graphical novel’ that deals with art, depression, suicide, and just living a life. No, that sounds trite but the idea of letters colliding into a statement that will give a feeling is pretty cool at least, right? What I’m getting at is that maybe the power of art is an artwork all to itself. Sharability, intended audience, subjectivity and what not. Besides, someone’s got a meme with good graphic design (I’m gonna guess a mountain range) of some shallow quote about Earth just being ‘eh’ without it that will basically cover the same grounds. You can always find the big, heavy quotations that attempt to maximize the beauty into a universal struggle for goodness and connectivity that improves us all, like Leo Tolstoy saying art ‘ is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity,’ but whew, if this is at a party it’ll kill the vibes pretty quickly. What is the purpose of art? This is a question everyone from philosophers to the drunk next to you at the bar has grappled with since, well, someone first smeared some berries on a wall and someone was affected by it. But instead I’m going to make something that didn’t exist before.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood