Review: So Much For Love (2022)
French cartoonist Sophie Lambda’s memoir about an emotionally abusive relationship opens with a clever subversion of a typical cute rom-com. A reader shouldn’t be fooled if they paid attention to the whole “how i survived a toxic relationship” bit on the cover, but Lambda pummels you with convincing sappiness via a montage of touching moments in a way that doesn’t quite betray itself — at least until the sequence’s climax, when the Lambda’s narrative voice descends into self-parody:
“He was the otter GIF of my Twitter feed, my #couplegoals on my Instagram, my first free Prime Month on Amazon, the jar of Nutella in my basket of organic veggies, the refined sugar in my detox smoothie, the cheat meal on my gluten-free diet, the chia grains in my Instafood, the Netflix of my rainy nights . . .”
Just when you think you’re going to suffocate from the cloying prose, the narrative careens through a wall — the fourth wall, to be exact — and a comics version of Sophie arrives to tell us that actually, things didn’t turn out very well and she decided to write a book (this book) in the hope that others could learn from her experience.
So Much For Love is mostly a straightforward memoir, but it’s also a kind of self-help book and a guide to recognizing manipulative, emotionally abusive assholes. It’s structured with those two goals in mind:
The first three-fourths are devoted purely to telling Lambda’s story — and it is quite brutal. While the boyfriend she writes about never physically hurt her, he did lie to her, cheat on her, isolate her from friends, and gaslight her into believing she was the problem, not him. The last 60 or so pages are devoted to explaining the warning signs that Lambda missed, plus strategies for getting yourself out should you find yourself in a similar situation.
As a comic, the book is also quite well done. Lambda knows when to explain things and when to drop in silent panels and let images do the work. She is also adept at using colors selectively to convey emotion. The book’s default mode is gray but the early pages are marked by shades of red that shift to blue when Lambda’s boyfriend starts to turn ugly. And when things get REALLY bad, the red returns. It’s like Lambda is pointing out that the overwhelming affection she experienced early in the relationship was, actually, not too different from the open hostility and gaslighting she dealt with later – they were both different shades of manipulation.
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