So here’s another quite outburst of Things What I Done Just Read. I’ve just put down a copy of The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood, and wanted to capture some thoughts on it quickly.
The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott is a 200ish page graphic novel that was published in 2020. It’s the debut work of Zoe Thorogood, who according to the book is 21, and according to her twitter is vision impaired, having had gradually deteriorating vision since the age of 4. It captures two incredibly rough weeks in the life of Billie Scott, an artist in her early twenties who suffers a detached retina after an assault, and is told that she’ll go completely blind in a short period of time. Following a drunken pep-talk with housemates she barely knows, she decides to go on a journey to paint ten portraits to use in the gallery exhibition she has just been accepted for. She’s woefully unprepared, but this act is sort of a preventative measure taken to avoid sitting alone and imploding, as self-destructive and dangerous as it is.
The story kind of darts around between Billie’s encounters with different people, but if you were new to living on the street your life would be pretty chaotic too, so it’s fitting. A series of new people (and one dog) gradually round out the ten portraits on her journey, and new relationships are built and shattered.
The art is good – I liked it. Look, I’m aware that I’ve just put out a phenomenally bland statement there but it was good – I wasn’t blown away but I don’t think I needed to be. I’m trying to think of who the art reminds me of, Paul Pope maybe? It’s certainly detailed, and the coloring is great. The book uses a muted color palette, and sticks with black & white, adding in an accent color for certain pages. I don’t know if there’s a theme to it, red pages mean this and blue pages mean that, but it helps create the tone that Zoe Thorogood is going for.
One thing that I liked about the story is that it’s not a touching ode to someone grappling with their impending disability. There’s a space for stories like that, and there are some really excellent examples (as an aside I’ve heard phenomenal things about The Sound of Metal and I really need to carve out some time to see it), but not every story about disability needs to cover this territory. The message that the author wants us to take away is that art is meaningful, and that we should attempt to create whenever we can. Art will change the world. This isn’t subtext, by the way, this is literally text and it’s spelled out for us in the last few pages by Billie.
Adding in Billie’s portraits at the end is a nice touch. The epilogue wraps things up perhaps a little too cutely for my taste, but it closes the book on the story well enough.
All in all, it’s an interesting read with an excellent title – I haven’t mentioned that I love the title earlier but my god do I ever. Definitely worth a read, and maybe I’ll go out and look for her second creation myself, rather than check it out from the local library like I did for this one.
Life, The Universe and Two-Minute Noodles 