The Brooklyn Rail

In the opening pages of her graphic memoir, Portrait of a Body, translated from French by Helge Dascher and Karen Houle, Julie Delporte writes, “The first time I had sex with a woman, all I had to go by were images and films made by men.” She goes on to say that in order to “overwrite those images,” she repeatedly watches the final scene of Chantal Ackerman’s Je tu il elle (1974). The text in these first pages is illustrated with expressive India ink drawings inspired by the film. Delporte brings the film to the page with gestural brushstrokes, showing two women embracing and then in bed together, until one walks away as the other is asleep. Though the rest of the book unfolds in Delporte’s bright pastel-hued colored pencil drawings and cursive handwriting, this black-and-white cinematic prologue can be read as a thematic and structural throughline to this diaristic memoir in text and images. In addition to telling the story of Delporte’s self-discovery of her sexuality, Portrait of a Body is also an allusive portrait of the art, books, and films that influenced her search for her identity and truth in her body.

“As far as I could tell, most late-life lesbians put it the same way: ‘One day I fell in love with a woman,’” Delporte writes, and then recounts the sexual violence she experienced at ages twelve and fourteen. These two memories face each other on pages thirty-six and thirty-seven, accompanied with a colored pencil drawing of a butterfly and dragonfly trapped in glass jars, set atop copies of the first two books in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series: Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, respectively. Both books are almost, but not fully drawn. Each has its own unfinished edge, still fuzzy with sketched lines. And toward the right-side margins of each page there are small swatches of pencil, a range of blues and a dot of yellow, showing Delporte’s drawing process of testing her colors. Delporte’s deliberate retention of the swatches from her drawing process, here and throughout the book, intensifies the intimacy of her personal narrative, which is frank and vulnerable in both language and image, and might also be read as a “living autobiography” of its own. In addition to Deborah Levy’s books, Portrait of a Body’s referential bibliography includes Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story.

Delporte also continues to reference films, including Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha. She draws and reflects on scenes from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, explaining that upon rewatching it for a third time she finally understood Jeanne’s impulse toward murder: “I could feel within myself her orgasm was a violent betrayal by her body. The way my body had betrayed me when I was a child. And later, each and every time I didn’t want to.” The pages that follow are illustrated with rainbow slices of agates, vibrant geometric rings that accompany Delporte’s searching and sensitive interrogation of her own relationship to and history with sex.

The stark contrast between the heaviness of the subject matter and the light softness of Delporte’s drawings is especially present in her renderings of the natural world. Some drawings, like of nasturtiums or fuschias, are botanically precise and recognizable. Others are more abstract, like the organic forms and splotches (identified in the end notes of the book as lichen on rocks) that illustrate her reflections on her sexuality: “It’s not that I was afraid of saying I didn’t want to have sex. It’s that I couldn’t even admit it to myself.” Bright green sprigs emerge from pale lavender rocks, suggesting the possibility of renewal, of the emergence of new life, even from something that is seemingly hardened and fossilized by time. Though some might find the distance between the images and the content of the narrative disjointed or even occasionally jarring, the juxtaposition of Delporte’s winsome colored pencil drawings with her confessional personal narrative, lettered in looped and bubbly cursive that evokes the mini-padlocked, ribbon-bookmarked diaries of teenagehood, emphasizes the vantage point from which she tells her story, and what has bloomed in her over time.

Delporte’s use of this diary comic format especially shines where she draws the dresses she used to wear, still kept because she “loved the fabrics.” Swaths of floral and geometric patterns brighten the pages, but don’t fill them. The dresses are only partially drawn, with the rest of the page left blank, further suggesting the possibility of transformation, of shedding one’s old skin for something new and unknown. Later, Delporte draws the shirt that Leonardo DiCaprio wears in Romeo + Juliet, a blue short sleeve button-up with a bouquet of yellow and red flowers, but leaves only white space where his face should be, as if she might one day wear the shirt herself. Delporte writes on the next page, “Looking back, I think he might have been the closest thing to a lesbian I’d ever seen.”

If a diary deals with the rhythms of daily life, then Portrait of a Body uses the diaristic conventions of an intimate confessional voice and the fragmentary and associative images of memory to zoom out. Delporte looks at herself from the panoramic distance of time and perspective, to witness her life through the eyes of her new self and identity. As she opens the book with a desire to “overwrite” the man-made images of lesbians, the rest of the book shows her reckoning with the misogynistic culture that shaped her and her embodied experience. Her body becomes a map of who she was before, and who she is now, and leaves space for who she will become as she finds new love within and beyond herself. This portrait is an indelible time capsule and testament to her journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance.