Part of Series

Graphic Medicine

Series · 21 books

By Henny Beaumont, Ian Williams, Sarah Lightman, and more

There is no “Book of Sarah” in the Bible, so artist Sarah Lightman sets out to make her own. In this quietly subversive graphic autobiography, Lightman follows the urge to find herself in the midst of training to become an artist, observing her faith, navigating family and romantic relationships, and learning to be a mother. Drawings of a Jewish children’s Bible, a package of crackers, a Lower East Side walk-up, Columbia University, and the outside of St. Paul’s Girls’ books and streets, buildings, objects, and portraits of people fill this coming-of-age story set in northwest London and New York City. The Book of Sarah traces the author’s journey from modern Jewish orthodoxy to a feminist Judaism, as she searches between the complex layers of family and family history that she inherited and inhabited. While the act of drawing came easily to Sarah, letting go of past failures, attachments, and expectations did not. These are the focus of her astonishingly beautiful pages, as we bear witness to her making the world her own. Poignantly narrated and illustrated with charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and oil, this is an intimate story of a self-in-becoming.

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Author

Sarah Lightman

Author · 1 books

Dr Sarah Lightman is a London-based artist, curator and writer. She attended Central/St Martin's and The Slade School of Art where she won The Slade Prize, The Coldstream Prize, and The Slade Life Drawing Prize. She has a PhD from University of Glasgow in women’s autobiographical comics. She has extensively published her research and her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Her first graphic novel, The Book of Sarah, will be published by Myriad in 2019. Sarah co-curated Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, an internationally touring exhibition of 18 comic artists, that opened at 9 museums over 6 years. She edited Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014), that was awarded The Susan Koppelman Prize for Best Feminist Anthology (2015) and The Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Publication (2015), an Association of Jewish Studies/Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Jews and The Arts (2016).