New York, NY: Abrams ComicArts, 2019. 304 pages. $24.99.
A commute is, at once, near universal and hyper-specific. Anyone who works outside the home has one—the experience is so common, it’s banal. Yet each individual’s journey is entirely unique to where they work and live. Regardless of the path taken, in the placelessness of being between places, the mind often wanders. But on public transportation, alone alongside others, there can be more intrusions into this private mental space than trips made other ways, especially while traveling in a female body.
In her new graphic memoir Commute, Erin Williams illustrates these phenomena through a single day’s round-trip commute in New York, not via subway but by long-distance commuter rail. Through chronological chapters, the reader moves through intimate details of her workday routine, like her 16-step skincare regimen, with detached humor. She observes the people she encounters, particularly the men, and some observe her; several trigger flashback memories. The commute frames a larger, more fragmented story of negotiating past and present as a straight (white) woman, a survivor of sexual trauma, and a recovering alcoholic.
Williams is also a new mother, a fact hinted in the second chapter (“I leave for work before my family is awake”) though not stated explicitly until later, as an aside during a flashback of past lovers (“This was reconfirmed by childbirth when I was sliced open across the middle in the shape of a smile”). For most of the day that comprises the story, motherhood is not shown overtly; that is, until her return home, where, as a working parent with a long commute, she sees her daughter, an infant of unspecified age, for the first time all day. In reflecting upon motherhood, Williams retains the same unflinching honesty she brings to her routine, though her tone grows more tender:
With new motherhood you are broken, and keep breaking and breaking until you are new. The new person who emerges is the mother.
Her partner remains unmentioned until the acknowledgements, after women’s co-working space The Wing and writer Emily Gould, who encouraged Williams to write and draw Commute. This intentional omission is another effective choice that maintains the narrative focus on the tension between past and present, rather than detailing a relationship that bridges both. These authorial decisions ring true to my own postpartum experience, when mentally escaping into the past allowed me to reconcile with my new reality at the same time that I was dissociating from it. I, too, had to reckon with a body that had created life but seemed “broken” because I no longer felt worthy of desire. I, too, didn’t want to read any books written by men.
Even when it’s not rendered on the page, motherhood looms throughout Commute as subtext, and the book could easily be shelved alongside graphic narratives that deal more directly with the identity shift of motherhood, such as Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley and Teresa Wong’s Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression. But the focus of Commute lies elsewhere, tapping into broadly relatable feelings of objectification and its accompanying shame. It builds into a resounding climax that echoes Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette as it zooms out to critique a culture in which women are “groomed for compliance”:
We women doubt the reality of our own experiences.
The culture that defines us grabs onto the question of consent so that all other abuses of power are still at play.
It’s our stories against theirs.
Our trauma becomes our shame.
Much of Commute is told not in scene but in flashback, denoted with cloud-bubble borders reminiscent of childhood doodles. The pages indicating present action range from full-bleed, full-color pictures to those with text alone, whether several paragraphs or single sentences. Williams’s illustrations also vary—some are photorealistic, especially those related to technology (Google Chat panels, the iPhone interface, Notes app screen grabs, a fake Rotten Tomatoes review of a terrible date) while her figures are minimalist, at times abstract. Brilliantly, her rapist’s face receives the crudest depiction: two dots for eyes, his mouth an upturned smiley.
Some of the alcohol-tinged memories seem a shade too vivid, though by the morning she decides to get sober, her thought bubble’s contents are merely a scribble. During one memory, she acknowledges, “I couldn’t remember bringing anyone home, my brain incinerated by booze,” but I would have liked to have seen more of this struggle to remember—a visual rendering of those gaps that accompany years “spent in or attempting” the “euphoric, quiet, twilight birth” of blackout drinking.
Like Julie Delporte’s This Woman’s Work, another recent illustrated memoir that explores memory and femininity, Commute foregoes panels, freeing Williams from the confines of sequential structure. While Delporte’s colored pencils build a woman’s world with pastels and loops of cursive, Williams’s visual style is less conventionally feminine: stark, mostly black and white with striking pops of color, and all-caps lettering. Yet Williams’s story is no less of a woman’s than Delporte’s. Commute thrums with the tension between desire and wanting to be desired during murky past encounters with men, who, when summoned through memory, transform into archetypes along the spectrum between nostalgia and trauma: “the first dick I ever saw”; the bartender who “knew I was young and fed me free whiskey”; the professor whose body looked like “a naked bunch of old plastic bags”; the guy who “called me and hung up so incessantly that I had to threaten him with a restraining order”; the man who “dragged me drunk away from a beach party to a neighbor’s yard and raped me.” An even deeper childhood trauma surfaces, though it is not fully explored.
As with her commute, Williams’s memories are specific, yet there’s something commonplace in her objectification as she navigates the world in a cisgender female body, “what it feels like to be treated only as a body, an assembly of holes.” She writes: “It’s the monotonous and mundane tragedy of every woman you know.” These experiences do not stay neatly in the past; they affect how we behave in the present.
When I’m about to get off the train at night I take inventory of the train car. Often I’m the only woman.
I’m scared.
It’s me and two men. I decide which one of them is more likely to rape me and which is more likely to intervene during the rape to save me.
The triumph of Commute lies in Williams’s effort to make the male gaze visible through 300 pages that render a distinctly female one. The whiteness of her gaze, however, remains uninterrogated; though perhaps beyond the scope of an already broad project, the racial implications of looking and making assumptions go unmentioned. From her illustrations, readers can see that Williams is white, along with every other character, aside from a few strangers on the train and men staring on the street. But her decision not to mention race limits the potential universality of a story that centers white femininity as the default, rather than acknowledging the narrowness of its specificity.
Nonetheless, Commute is a necessary addition to the medium of graphic narrative, long dominated by men. Its publication is timely, part of the massive cultural shift in the wake of #MeToo, as women continue to share stories that, for so long, went unspoken. The gravity of its themes is balanced by its frank humor, which makes for an engaging read, especially while riding a train.