Finding the Light: A Mother’s Journey from Trauma to Healing

Henley, creator of the long-running weekly comic strip Maxine, recounts in this fearless and lyrical graphic memoir her decision to tell her adopted son, William, about her history as a sexual assault victim. Triggered by language degrading women in the pop music he listens to, she sits William down and discusses the two times she was raped: in her dorm room at age 19 in the 1970s, and at gunpoint in a clothing store in the ’90s. With brutal clarity, she depicts the attacks and their aftermaths, noting the callous way she was treated by the justice system in the ’70s, in particular. She excoriates the families of the perpetrators, describing how the mother of her first rapist, a privileged young white man, tried to get her son off the hook. The friends and family of Henley’s second attacker, who was Black, are depicted glaring at her with the labels “whore” and “white trash.” Lasting trauma arises at unexpected moments: “Rape is like a bomb,” she writes, “leaving part of you destroyed and part of you perfectly intact.” Henley’s loose, quivering linework is acrobatic; simple, understated panels periodically give way to a vividly rendered memory or a fiercely expressive face. The pain in her story is braced by her hope, elegantly expressed, that sharing it can make a difference, and her lithe art makes a difficult topic approachable. This joins the ranks of works like Diane Noomin’s Drawing Power that raise awareness of sexual violence through the immediacy of comics memoir. Agent: Betsy Amster, Amster Literary. (Mar.)