cremains | Productivity

A friend of mine asked me to illustrate her memoir: she was raised Catholic until 13, converted to Judaism at 14 (custody battle), became a travelling singer, then a nun for many many years, and is now back to practicing Judaism and living here. What makes her writing unique is a fantastic and absolute lack of hindsight - she describes the same experience now as horrible, now as beautiful, now as neutral, and it's up to the reader to piece together not exactly the unreliability of the narrative, but rather its honesty.

Here is my first illustration, in which she gets an abortion, one of the events that led up to her becoming a nun.

In one of the most messed-up, powerful parts of the book, she likens the zygote in her womb being flooded with saline solution to her 14-year-old self in the mikvah. Here I drew her in her own womb, drowning, her uterus crowded with all the voices of condemnation that invaded her decision-making process and ended up crippling her with guilt.