This piece was to appear in the Toronto Star in October 2008, but was unfortunately killed for space.
It's easy to feel invisible in Toronto, especially when your boyfriend leaves, your co-workers forget your name and your cat runs away. That's why Marnie, the fading anti-heroine of Fear of Fighting decides to wallow in her studio apartment and count the days until she disappears completely.
Written by Stacey May Fowles and illustrated by Marlena Zuber, Fear of Fighting compiles the secret confessions of an unambitious woman nearing 30 whose youthful aspirations and romantic illusions have been erased by student loan payment overload.
Marnie misses her hygienically challenged rocker ex-boyfriend Ben, but even Ben's big dog Bill hid from the conflict-ridden couple. As their relationship ends, Marnie would rather play the victim than admit they were "the kind of couple that bickers without restraint or shame, making humiliating each other publicly an art form – a competitive sport that embarrasses everyone but themselves."
Without anyone to curb her melodramatic tendencies, Marnie becomes unable to leave her apartment over fears she'll be pushed onto subway tracks or attacked by pigeons. "Dread overwhelms me and I am gone," Marnie notes. "My mind is consumed by what is possible, and never with what is probable." At the vanishing point of invisibility, Marnie watches TV in her pajamas, orders things online and obsesses over diseases, tragic accidents and missed connections posts on Craigslist. It takes the return of her missing cat, Olive, and a surprise (albeit intoxicated) visit by Ben's stunning new girlfriend Fiona for Marnie to re-emerge.
Zuber's illustrations enhance the tragicomic elements of Marnie's story and inject welcome frivolity into the lugubriousness. As Marnie contemplates Chef Lonelyheart's Soup for One at No Frills, Zuber's Warhol-esque illustration shows her reaching for a Campbell's tin at the bottom of a towering tomato soup pyramid. The image of Marnie sitting at a desk with a bag of shredded paper for a head underscores the mindlessness of her administrative job. And when Marnie runs into Ben and his new girlfriend at Shoppers Drug Mart, Zuber draws Marnie's fantasy smackdown.
This is an illustrated novel as opposed to a graphic one. Zuber's imaginative drawings, while amusing, show action Fowles has already described instead of pushing the narrative in new directions. Yet the result is a sophisticated picture book for the Facebook and Xanax generation.
This is Fowles's second novel, and while her emotional passages tend to meander, she's as deft as a psychotherapist at diagnosing her characters' neuroses. Fear of Fighting puts a spyglass up to the overblown miseries, rampant hypochondria and private anxieties we all think are uniquely our own.
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