Dear Sophie, Love Sophie
A Graphic Memoir in Diaries, Letters, and Lists
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
What would you say to your teenage self if you could?
Inspired by the journals she kept growing up, Sophie Lucido Johnson began an interactive conversation between her younger self and her current self. When she began the exercise, Sophie envisioned sharing important lessons on what it means to love your body, navigate relationships, and discover what fulfills you, no matter where life takes you. But as these “exchanges” deepened, adult Sophie discovered she had much to learn about life from young Sophie as well.
Fully illustrated with handwritten text, Dear Sophie, Love Sophie deftly explores topics like queer identity, body image, inherited trauma, belonging, privilege, heartbreak, first love, and much more in a unique and captivating way. Charming, witty, and poignant, it reminds us that wisdom is not limited by age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson (Many Love) returns to the memoir genre with a cute setup that juxtaposes her adolescent diary entries with responses from her adult self. In sections organized by theme rather than by chronology, Johnson engages with relationships and sexuality, disordered eating and body positivity, Weird Al, self harm, and sisterhood. Part comics memoir, part self-help, Johnson assures Young Sophie that she's "proud of both of " for doing what they needed to survive, but ultimately concludes that "it's time... to stop looking back" and live in the present moment. The whimsical character drawings (with stylized red triangle noses) and curlicue font recall Lucy Knisley, but the handwritten diary entries are cramped. Adult Sophie can verge into an overly teacherly tone, such as where she diagrams the LGBTQIA+ initialism. Still, the more elaborately drawn and personal sections land well, among them the rocky river against which Sophie explains her own sexual orientation. Comics memoir fans looking for shapely narrative may find it didactic, but readers eager to embrace self-reflection as an exercise, even if awkward in sections, can find inspiration in resonant messages of self-love and healing. Not all readers will have the patience to stick with the soliloquizing.
