My Perfectly Imperfect Body

By Chloe Horning, Librarian

Readers may be familiar with Debbie Tung from her earlier works of graphic autobiography. Book Love explores her love of reading. Quiet Girl in a Noisy World is about her experiences as an introvert. Her first foray into what we might call the Graphic Medicine space was Everything is Okay, a personal memoir of her struggles with anxiety and depression.

My Perfectly Imperfect Body is a recounting of Debbie’s difficulties with disordered eating during her teen and early adult years.

Tung’s visual style is gentle and soothing. Her figures are soft and rounded, with minimalistic features. The characters are distinctive enough to be recognizable, but so simple as to make it easy for the reader to imagine herself in the story. As with her previous work Everything is Okay, Tung mostly draws in softly shaded grayscale, occasionally and skillfully deploying a pop of watercolor. Here, as in Okay, flashes of color indicate moments of hope, clarity, or enhanced emotion.

Tung’s narrative style is to intersperse pages which tell her personal story with ones which represent her inner monologue. On one page, a full color illustration shows Debbie standing before an idealized landscape of a river valley and wide-open sky, with the caption “how can a body that lets me experience the world like this be disgusting and shameful?” (pg. 163) On the following page, we are back to the quotidien black and gray tones and a series of panels in which Debbie sits across a kitchen table from her parents, telling them that she wishes to apply to art college.

While the book includes an appendix with a list of organizations and support resources for people struggling with eating disorders (EDs), the idea that it is okay to ask for help with a disorder is not borne out by the text. In Tung’s version of events, she seemingly pulls herself out of her ED by her bootstraps, without meaningful intervention from her family or friends, and with no professional help. While I don’t doubt the truth of her story, or the idea that many ED sufferers may begin to recover from their conditions in this way, I find it to be an overly simplistic narrative that the text does not attempt to problematize.

For some young readers, this book might be beneficial. The overall tone is that of a trustworthy older sister, candidly recounting her struggles with food, image, and exercise throughout her teen years. A great aspect of this book is the way in which it normalizes the thoughts, feelings, and inner monologue around body image that so many young people inevitably experience in our image-obsessed world. Although the narrative can be simplistic at times, I appreciated the moments where Tung shows that her trajectory away from disordered eating was not always linear, and clarifies that she makes a daily “conscious decision to not let diet culture influence my self-worth” (173).

Chloe Horning (MLIS) is a community college librarian from the Seattle area.