Forsyth Harmon: Author of "Justine" Talks Teen Friendship, Anorexia and the Incarnation of the Image-Text Trend
Forsyth Harmon’s debut novel, Justine, is an intimate and raw examination of adolescent female friendship and identity. The books’ gritty themes juxtaposed beside the author’s own black and white illustrations are reminiscent of those D.I.Y. zine days of the nineties. Harmon serves up adolescent angst, self-loathing, and obsession without sugar-coating the very real growing pains of teenagedom. Justine follows Long Island teenager Ali through the summer of 1999 as she gets a job at the local Stop & Shop where she meets Justine and is seduced into her world of anorexia, drinking, and shoplifting. I spoke with Forsyth Harmon via email about the book's depiction of teen friendship, anorexia, and the relationship between text and image in a culture growing ever more consumed with narrative scrolling.
Shelby Hinte: Justine is a unique novel in that it is hard to pigeonhole it into a single category. It is marketed as a novel, but it could also fit the description of a novella; it feels resonant for both young adults and adult readers; it includes illustration, but isn't quite a graphic novel. What about telling this story compelled you to work within a variety of forms?
Forsyth Harmon: I have always worked between image and text. As a child I wrote and illustrated girl detective stories, and I funneled those same efforts into zines as a teen. I’ve also lived between image and text in my day job in advertising and marketing. And my husband, Paul Stephens, studies and writes about image-text works! His most recent book, absence of clutter, is an exploration of minimal writing as art and literature.
I wanted to produce a book in which form mirrored content. Ali, the book’s teenage narrator, is stoic, and lives in a quiet home. She struggles to communicate with family and friends. This is reflected in Justine’s length. Ali seeks to escape her small-town existence paging through glossy magazines and shoplifting luxury items at the mall. The illustrations become an extension of Ali’s image-obsessed consciousness. Finally, I chose the paper-over-board format for the book object itself because it most resembled the books in my high school library. Some may call the book small, but it is whole.
SH: I have noticed a growing trend in hybridized work, especially in the creative non-fiction world. Why do you think writers and readers are drawn to these structures?
FH: Perhaps this most recent incarnation of the image-text trend is inspired by the ubiquity of image-text combinations we scroll through each day on our laptops and phones. As we consume, so we create.
Social media has a way of not just aggregating but also flattening the personal and the global; the pop cultural and the political. We see a lot of this kind of content DJing in recent nonfiction. I’m thinking here of Morgan Jerkins’s This Will Be My Undoing, Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism, and Jia Tolentio’s Trick Mirror, all of which I recommend.
SH: One thing that particularly moved me about Ali's character in the book was her interest in people who seem to embody self-harm (Justine with her anorexia and Ryan with his cutting). Why do you think she is so interested in these types of people?
FH: Ali hates herself. She admits this the first time she meets Ryan. “He hated me,” she says, “and I hated myself, which created an unexpected point of agreement between us.”
While Ali thinks Ryan is ugly, and even reports being disgusted by him, it’s when she sees the cuts on his body that she changes her mind. He removes his clothes, and she thinks: “Something about the cuts made me realize I’d wanted to touch him all this time. He was a real naked person standing there, all cut up.”
Ali is attracted to both Justine, an anorexic, and Ryan, a cutter, because they wear their self-hatred. She sees the pain she feels in their bodies.
SH: I recently heard you mention in conversation with Nina Renata Aron that you saw a connection between eating disorders and addiction in their ability to give the illusion that the world is small and manageable (at least initially) because they are hinged on a clear barometer of success or failure. What did you hope Justine might add to the addiction and mental illness narrative(s)?
FH: I wrote about eating disorders from experience. Mine was worst at Ali’s age, and while I’ve found relative health as an adult, addiction never really leaves you. It always has to be managed. I wrote about anorexia and bulimia because I believe it’s important to share struggles. It offers both the writer and the reader—who may have had a similar experience—to feel less alone.
Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering did this for me. I’d never read a book that spoke so directly to my own experience of the interrelationship between calorie restriction and alcoholism—and alcoholism and writing. It inspired my sobriety.
SH: In that same conversation, you mentioned Alexander Chee and autofiction. Do you consider Justine to be autofiction, and, if so, what does autofiction provide you as a writer that is different from fiction or nonfiction?
FH: Yes, Justine is autofiction. I grew up on Long Island around the same time my narrator did, and I had a grandmother very much like hers, among other similarities.
In the title essay of Alexander Chee’s collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, he gives this advice:
Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.
To do this, use the situations but not the events of your life.
Invent a character like you, but not you…
Or it is remorseful in exactly the same way as you, but something else is what changes as you write it, until you understand you and it are apart…
You have invented this self because the ways you are human are not always visible to yourself. All of this is a machine to make yourself more human.
This resonates. For me, writing is a way of finding myself, or as Chee says, “making myself more human.” Creating a character that resembles myself—then peeling it apart from myself so I can recognize it as separate: this process allows me to see, and feel more empathy for, myself—and thereby others. Writing autofiction is the humanization machine.
SH: What was the process like from your initial idea of Justine to its final publication, and what was the biggest lesson you learned from the process?
FH: Justine began as a short story. The expansion into something more began with images: full-color watercolor illustrations of the people, places, and things that felt integral to the narrator’s world. Those images became a kind of visual first draft.
From there I began to work between images and text, producing what became my MFA thesis. During my final thesis conference, I was told by a prominent novelist to cut the images and rewrite the project as a traditional novel. I was crushed but rewrote Justine without illustrations. Still, after finishing that revision, I missed them. I knew in my heart they belonged. Through editing, the writing had become more economical, so I let go of the watercolor and redrew everything in black and white to align the verbal and the visual. That’s how Justine came to be.
The biggest lesson I learned is the one my very first fiction workshop instructor tried to teach me, but I could only grasp through experience: for most of us, publishing a book is less about talent, and more about endurance.
SH: What projects are you currently working on?
FH: I’m thrilled to be illustrating E.B. Bartels’s nonfiction: Good Grief: On Loving Pets Here and Hereafter, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2022. It’s a first-person journey through the world of loving and losing animals, exploring the singular nature of our bonds with our companion animals, and how best to grieve for them once they’ve passed away. I’m especially excited about the opportunity to get better at drawing and painting cats. I’m going to begin by copying Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s work. He’s the cat master.
SH: What is your writing process like?
FH: Writing is one of the many things that keeps me not just sane but, I hope, evolving, along with: drawing, getting enough exercise and rest, eating well, maintaining financial stability (which for most of us does not come with writing), reading, spending time with family and friends—and time by myself, in silence. I do not have a fixed daily writing routine. Some months, I’ll write every day; others not at all. For me, time passed is often the best editor. I’ll get stuck, and sometimes it’s as easy as taking the afternoon off and returning to the manuscript the next morning, rested. But often, more distance is required, and the only way to move forward with the writing is to go learn something by living life—to go out in the world and build my character.
SH: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors or those working in hybrid modes?
FH: Use the tools at my disposal to tell the story that compels you. Know that working in hybrid modes may require you to try harder to get both feedback and traction. For instance, I studied both writing and art in an institutional setting, but since the departments were separate (there was no image-text program) the system wasn’t set up to support practices that spanned both disciplines. I understand this is changing with greater interest in graphic novels. And, when I studied, there were a handful of instructors who engaged across image and text. But I did have to do a lot of running up and down both the literal and metaphorical stairs, between the writing and art departments. Too, when my agent submitted the illustrated novel for publication, some houses wouldn’t look at it simply because it had images. Happily, the book eventually found the perfect home—and yours will too—with, as I said, endurance.
Forsyth Harmon is the author and illustrator of the illustrated novel Justine (Tin House, 2021). She is also the illustrator of Girlhood by Melissa Febos and The Art of the Affair by Catherine Lacey, and has collaborated with writers Alexander Chee, Hermione Hoby, Sanaë Lemoine, and Leslie Jamison. Forsyth’s work has been featured in Granta, BOMB, Refinery29, The Believer, and more. She received an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New York.
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate award. She has been a contributing food and beverage writer for Edible Santa Fe. Her fiction has appeared in Entropy, Maudlin House, Witness Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about women and vortexes in the desert. You can follow her @shelbyhinte_ and read her work at www.shelbyhinte.com
