Natalie Norris has been producing memoir about trauma since before she started at CCS. Even in her earliest assignments at the school, she turned standard first-year assignments like adapting a fable from Aesop or doing a comic in the style of Ed Emberley into frank, bold, and highly vulnerable narratives about her traumatic experiences. It's no surprise that her first long-form memoir, Dear Mini, should not only expand on her struggles, but it's also the one where she reveals, in an achingly intimate manner, her most formative traumatic experience.
Norris uses a very clever narrative technique in making this an epistolary memoir for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that it allows her to comment on events from the past from the perspective of the future, which is what differentiates it from the most obvious comparable book, Ulli Lust's This Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life. That's another memoir about a teenage girl out of her depth in Europe who is raped, but Lust chooses to convey that experience in the present tense for a different kind of impact. Norris not only adds commentary from the future in the form of huge, floating decorative lettering, but her dreamy open-page layout style gives the entire memoir a magical storybook feel until things start to go very wrong.
Secondly, by addressing it to her Austrian friend Mini, whom she feels inadvertently betrayed her, she puts the narrative power in her own hands rather than grant it to her nameless rapist. This is an unflinching account of being sexually assaulted and its aftermath and reverberations across the years, but more importantly, it's an attempt to connect and truly reach out to someone who meant a lot to her. This narrative is Norris's own, and she's sharing it with Mini.
Norris noted in the afterword of this first volume that she had reams of diaries and photos that documented her time in Europe, but for the most part, she chose to rely on her memory. This made for a much more emotionally rich narrative, as it followed the path of memories that she allowed herself to unlock by drawing them rather than compelling her to commit to a more "true" account of those events. Of course, even a diary or journal from that time, while more immediate, isn't necessarily more accurate. Indeed, as Norris points out, she deliberately downplayed most of the key moments of trauma in those journals.
The plot summary for part one of Dear Mini goes like this: Natalie is 17 years old and suffers from chronic pain and depression, among other issues. Natalie was quite used to the attention given to her by older men, which was a form of flattery she sometimes chased but was also frequently repulsed by it. Her mother suggested that she try a language immersion summer program in France as a way of trying to push her away from getting drunk and high with local older guys. Upon arriving, she met an Austrian girl named Mini, and they became thick as thieves, constantly pushing against the rules in order to go out dancing and drinking as well as meeting guys. Norris was young enough to conflate desire with love in an environment where sex, generally speaking, was treated as far more casual than in American culture.
This invoked the key line of the book: as she found herself treated with contempt by the boys who used her sexually, she convinced herself that "this was just what happened to girls like me." That her desire made her worthless and unworthy of expressing her own agency. That lesser forms of horrible treatment by men were somehow OK because they were "nicer" to her than out-and-out assailants. The flip side of constantly wanting to be drunk or high as a way of numbing these feelings had the double whammy of not only being ultimately ineffective, it also made her far more vulnerable. Eventually, after the program, Natalie spent time in Italy and then made a side trip to see Mini in Vienna.
That's where the bulk of the narrative really picks up and slows down, as Norris goes day by day in great detail with regard to this fateful visit. She alludes to the event, the birthday party of one of Mini's friends, multiple times (even referring to it as an execution), yet her depiction of the rape itself is far more harrowing, direct, and graphic than I could have imagined, even given how frank she was about everything else. It reads as though Norris was disgorging a malignant tumor in the most painful way possible; an excruciating experience in every way as a reader and one would imagine, as an artist, yet one where at least the malignancy was out in the open. As awful as this depiction of this all was, the events afterward (where she internalizes everything and hides it from Mini and then winds up fooling around with another guy just to not be alone with her thoughts) are terrible in their own way. All of this is made even more devastating in Norris' bright, colorful, and dreamy style.
Norris alludes to having discussed this with Mini over the years, with Mini not understanding Norris' anger to not only being abandoned at this party but virtually being pushed into the clutches of her rapist. The nature of this disconnect is something that I imagine will be discussed in part two. While I can understand the split, it feels like doing this in a single volume would have done more justice to the narrative as a whole. There are some other problems with the book that reveal Norris as a relatively inexperienced cartoonist, but this is stuff that should have been corrected by an editor. Basic design issues like word balloon flow, word balloon blocking, large lettering being split by a figure and making it hard to read, and even a typo are all distractions. Norris' character design for figures other than herself seems a bit undercooked at times, which is not unusual for young artists having to introduce multiple characters in a longer narrative.
Those are mostly nitpicks. What Norris does here is unlock a tremendously powerful narrative about the ways in which memory can be warped and poisoned as it is obliterated by shame, trauma, and misogyny. Her use of color, her understanding of how using decorative drawings can influence the narrative, and her strong & distinctive authorial voice all drive this memoir to an unflinching place that eventually grants herself and women who have similar stories a sense of grace and absolution that no one else has given them.
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