Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir

by Soph Myers-Kelley

Bishakh Som in Spellbound introduces the reader to a memoir experience about culture, immigration, queerness, transness, tantalizing foods, and crushing identity crises. It’s ideal for older teenagers and adults. One of the most interesting creative decisions Som makes in her book is the choice to use a stand-in cisgender Bengali American character named Anjali instead of depicting her own likeness as the protagonist. Som herself is a transgender Bengali American woman, who came out as an adult.  She originally created this work as a diary comic before stringing together longer chapters.

This book is a complex, note taking and highlighting worthy introspection on growing up with Bengali culture while living in a multi-cultural, American and UK-centric world. It’s about caretaking for your aging parents and grieving their loss, while also growing out of the restrictive career, romance, gender, and life expectations they had for you. It’s about cooking delicious vegetarian and fish-based meals, highs and lows with dating and intimacy, trans for trans relationships, and one’s search for meaning in the professional world. Anjali, recently losing both of her parents in a relatively short period, takes a year off with her inheritance money to leave the architecture world and pursue the creation and publication of a graphic novel. Self-doubt, little joys, queer longing, a sweet cat named Ampersand, and coming of age are all ample, present and delightful to experience for the reader.

One loss of having a cisgender woman character represent a transgender author is intentionally missing of the transgender experience. Som explains in an interview why she depicted herself introducing and finishing the book, but the bulk centers on her cisgender representative, Anjali: “… I felt like I had to explain the initial substitution – of having Anjali be my ambassador, seeing as I really didn’t want to draw myself. I also wanted to process what that substitution meant for me as a trans person, how my persistent writing of women and femme characters in my comics became more and more loaded with meaning even before I realized I was trans.” (from here) The trans subtext is rich, and in some memories she recalls how she wishes classmates, family, and friends treated her (like they would treat Anjali, a cisgender woman), instead of a closeted trans person.

Som experimented with depicting women and femmes as an initially unintentional way of reckoning with her own gender, and that is a force in the storytelling of Spellbound. This book is a matured and nuanced take on aging, Alzheimer’s, death, queer attraction, and gender, and includes intersections on culture, tradition, career, patriarchy, and the losing and finding of self. A great read and a great re-read (to absorb all the cultural references, new words, and communication nuggets that I missed). And in the end, Anjali and the cat Ampersand share a recipe for Baba’s Khichuri, which I can’t wait to try for myself!

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Soph Myers-Kelley is a medical librarian, herbalist, and activist living in North Carolina. They can be contacted at https://www.smyerskelley.com/ and followed at https://www.instagram.com/sophmyerskelley/