‘Shrink’ by Rachel M Thomas: A compelling graphic novel about navigating fatphobia as a young woman

What is it like to move through the world when everyone tries to change who and what you are? This is the fundamental experience that the graphic novel Shrink explores in its stylistic depiction of the author’s autobiographical experience of being fat.

The book opens with the author hospitalised. Even while lying in bed with oxygen tubes, Rachel M. Thomas’s mind is racing – will people think that she’s there because she’s fat? How are others judging her? This sense of claustrophobic, understandable paranoia persists throughout the novel.

As Thomas shows, to be fat is to be judged. Herein lies the most interesting contribution of this book: what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a hugely fatphobic society?

Thomas masterfully weaves together academic insight, autobiographical experience and graphic art to explore these questions. As the reader moves through Thomas’s experiences of her body, we increasingly see how fatphobia shapes her experiences and interactions.

The relationship with fatness

This includes the frustrating and anger-inducing experiences of accessing healthcare. Thomas is repeatedly told to just “lose weight” even when it’s irrelevant to her health concern. Doctors choose to remind her that her body could be smaller, instead of engaging with the specific symptoms she experiences.

Beyond the horrors of medical trauma,...

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