Everything in Color
A Love Story
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
USA TODAY Bestseller!
"In her luminous debut, Stalvey meditates on her separation from fundamentalist Christianity and how she found love despite questioning her faith. " —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"An artistically attractive, self-reflective examination of one woman’s post-Evangelical spirituality." —Library Journal
"Intimate, searching, and visually striking, a book that feels as much like a reckoning as it does a genuine release." —AIPT Comics
"Stalvey provides some of the clearest and most straightforward writing and visual storytelling coming out of the post-evangelical community today." —Hippocampus Magazine
Interrogating her own upbringing in an evangelical community, Stephanie Stalvey weaves a story of faith, alienation, romance and acceptance, in this beautifully painted graphic memoir.
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical community where love and obedience were overlapping themes. In this world, sin was inevitable, her body was a temptation, and desire was dangerous. Her own thoughts could not be trusted, because she was only saved if she believed the "right things" about God.
But as she grew, built a life of her own, and fell in love with a young seminarian named James, the complexities of the human experience became impossible to ignore. Was God truly so exacting and judgmental? Could faith exist beyond these rigid borders? Could love be both passionate and pure? Her connection to James—honest, caring and sensual—became a safe place for her worldview to expand. And when their son was born, she understood love in a whole new way… suddenly, everything was sacred, everything was in color.
Through striking prose and beautiful mixed media illustrations, Stalvey takes us on an emotional journey of faith, romance, motherhood and loss. With tenderness and honesty, she unravels the fear and guilt woven into her past, reclaims her sense of self, and shows us how to embrace a love that is healing, transformative, and wholly one's own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her luminous debut, Stalvey meditates on her separation from fundamentalist Christianity and how she found love despite questioning her faith. Born into a "lineage of preachers and teachers," young Stephanie and her sister grow up so conservative that they're discouraged from looking at "unnecessarily graphic" Bible illustrations. Sermons about sin and sacrifice lead Stephanie to self-harm at an early age (pinching herself, she speaks to Jesus: "This pain is nothing... compared to what I deserve"), and her family considers corporal punishment essential to correct children's inborn sinfulness. "Everything was either black or white," Stephanie reflects, and the art literalizes this in monochrome anecdotes from her youth. In the present day, rendered in full color, adult Stephanie is married with a young son, teaching art, and deciding whether she wants to return to church. Her perspective changed, as fundamentalist parents often fear, in college. Though she initially steeled herself against "dangerous ideas coming from a secular professor," she started to ask questions in her Bible study group, and her romance with gentle seminary student James made her doubt the harsh, punitive version of love she was raised in. Stalvey's sensual, organic art is especially striking in the full-color passages. She devotes pages to richly symbolic compositions of saints, devils, wolves, and nature. Readers of Craig Thompson's Blankets will fall for this nuanced self-portrait.
