Funny, poignant memoir of self discovery
Even as a little girl, Ellie always felt different. As Eleanor Crewes writes in the prologue to her memoir, she always felt she had a secret deep inside, one “I had to keep very safe, but wasn’t allowed to open until the time was right.”
The title of Crewes’ book gives away the secret: “The Times I Knew I Was Gay.” But this memoir in graphic form takes readers along on her journey of self-discovery with a story that’s sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.
The book began in 2017 as a hand-stitched zine. Crewes, an illustrator and graphic novelist, not only wrote and illustrated it but delivered it by bicycle to comic shops around London. Its audience grew, leading to publication of an expanded version first in the United Kingdom and now on this side of the Atlantic.
It begins in Ellie’s childhood, when she stands out among her schoolmates for her fondness for ghost stories and her insistence on wearing trousers to her first holy communion.
When she’s 10 years old, she and her friends watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and Ellie is instantly obsessed, especially with Willow. She calls herself Willow in games of makebelieve and “had my long red hair chopped to my shoulders exactly like hers (think Season Three, Episode Sixteen, ‘Doppelgangland’).” When Willow’s character comes out and starts a relationship with another girl, Ellie doesn’t talk about it with her family, but she does “sit in my room and draw a lot of comics about them.”
The transition from her “small, rosy-cheeked, Catholic primary school” to a much larger secondary school is confusing, as it would be for most kids. For Ellie the confusion is increased by peer pressure to acquire a boyfriend. Most girls are awkward at that at first, but Ellie is just plain mystified: “There was something that didn’t feel right, but I chose to ignore it.”
Crewes traces Ellie’s years in secondary school and then in college, watching as a boy she knows is bullied for being gay, trying to learn flirting techniques, being teased for being a virgin.
“What’s funny for me,” she writes, “is that I didn’t even know that there was a closet — or that I was very much stuck inside it.”
Then Ellie gets a job in a bar and meets a chef named Rose, and her journey out begins. The first time she announces she’s gay, at a New Year’s Eve party, her friends are supportive: “You’re finally Willow!”
But it’s another two years before she comes out again, and even longer before she first falls in love.
Crewes’ charming storytelling is complemented by her clean-lined, expressive drawings. The best-known graphic memoir about growing up gay is Alison Bechdel’s 2006 book “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” which became a Broadway musical. “Fun Home” has plenty of sharp edges and dark corners; it deals not only with Bechdel’s sexuality but with themes of family dysfunction and suicide. “The Times I Knew I Was Gay” is much gentler in spirit, its humor more sweet than satirical.
Ellie does struggle, not only with her sexuality but with eating disorders and panic attacks. But when she comes out, and comes out again, and again, her friends and family take it in stride.
Perhaps that’s another kind of illustration, one of how much attitudes have changed just in the couple of generations between Bechdel and Crewes. Figuring out their sexuality might always be a challenge for kids, but perhaps we’re moving toward a world in which no one needs to hide because of it.