Even Immersed in Loss, Julie Maroh's Graphic Novel Reminds Us That Love is, in Some Way, Immortality

[The novel] also served to tell the story of how a romatic encounter happens, how a love story builds, collapses, and what remains of the love that was awakens after a breakup, a mourning, a death.

There is one thing you cannot deny, as much as one can tell you that this book is a poignant and emotionally charged bildungsroman-y tale of discovery, growth and love. We cannot escape the sense of loss, of grief and sadness that foreshadows the first few pages of this boook where we find Emma and an older woman returning from a funeral, faces wet with tears, morosed expressions from the weight of grief and defeat. It is when we discover that the funeral was that of this woman's daughter, Emma's lover, that we get to grasp just a bit of what this book intends to impart on the reader. I use the word 'immortality' lightly in my point on how the book is an emotionally-charged novel on love and the power that it has, how it builds where it once broke and makes us whole again, makes us eternal. Because, as the protagonist says in her letters: Love is eternal. It is in this loss, this immense feeling of hopelessness that we truly find love; as it begins with an ending, which to us the readers, is only the beginning of the story. It is at Clementine's house, our protagonist who's died, that Emma stays after the funeral to collect Clem's diary, which she had been writing from when she was very young - before she even met Emma. It is blue, a colour that, as she continues to write, has become the warmest. It is in this diary that Clem narrates the story from its genesis - a young girl like any other in high school, with family and friends and the attention of boys, yet at the depth of this normalcy lies dormant this feeling of confusion, of yearning for that which you do not have the language to name. It is when gay best friend Valentin invites her out that we are introduced to this blue-haired rebel who will, from this point, be the starring lead in Clementine's nocturnal sexual fantasies - an encounter that is so instantanious it erupts into a secret affair that questions Clementine's relationships with the people in her life. Julie Maroh does an impeccable job of portraying these moments through her drawings, vividly illustrated packed with life and expressions; these illustrations carry the story to its relevant heights where the reader's imagination explodes from the merge of both what's visual and left to the imagination. There is but very little colour in Maroh's drawings, which I deduce was deliberate in the storytelling since every other scene from Clementine's flashback narration is in black-and-white, if not for Emma's elusive signature hair. This marks the differences in the story's timelines. It’s a stroke of genius that blue is the only color visible in the majority of the book: it symbolizes how Emma is the sole glimmer of hope in Clem’s life, brightening her dull and melancholy life. When Clem fantasizes about Emma for the first time, Emma’s skin glows white, like an angel or fairy, while the blue dye drips down her arms onto Clem’s body, giving her her vitality. Tackling themes of the gradual curiousity and coming-to-terms experience of a teenager's burgeoning sexuality, of first love and the tumultuous journey of navigating a relationship that turns out to be a meeting of kindred souls. It is here that the element of immortality, of how love and having been loved fully and loudly can make us eternal. The book is a literal example of that. Emma, in her grief-stricken presence, where she is holding Clementine's memory at her closest, works to keep her in her heart and her soul forever. Similarly, within the pages of Clementine's diary, the love shared by the two womens - loud, brimming with youthful hunger and passion, existing over the years they spent together - never comes to an end. The pages of this one diary immortalises them, in such a way that not even death can remove either of them from it.

Julie Maroh's graphic novel is so robust with passion, from the raging feelings of a hormonal teenager discovering her own sexuality, to the sex shared by people in love and in lust with one another, and the way they ferociously claim it; it spills out of the pages how truly warm a feeling it is when your heart meets another that shares its beat. You can almost forget the inescapable truth of this story, that as beautyful as it is, one will have to live without the other. When you reach the end, you’ll imagine you have lived a lifetime with Clem and Emma, and perhaps you’ll feel the devotion they had for one another too. One can only dream of loving and being loved like that.