By Annemarie Jutel Catherine Ocelot’s Symptômes is a lovely piece of embroidery.  A collection of graphic narratives about pain, illness, suffering and loneliness are carefully stitched together to bring agency, if not quite joy, to the female protagonists whose suffering creates the fabric of the novel. While it is hard to know if the story is autobiographical (and perhaps it doesn’t matter), the principal character bears the author’s name, and prefaces the book by letting us know about her simultaneous fixation with medical television drama and her parallel hypochondriac tendencies.  She is enthralled by these confident and capable white-coated creatures,… Read More