Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah is an ambitious and moving chronicle of Lightman’s experiences from childhood to parenthood, embedded within a framework of Jewish feminist approaches. It is biography intertwined with hazy memory, family mythology, and some meaningful and other not-so meaningful objects which combine in a forceful way to remind the reader that our own life stories are a mixture of fact and fiction. It must be noted at the outset that the artwork is a triumph; it has always been this reader’s personal preference to see the hand of the artist at work in the art, and Lightman’s art is full of her touch.

This is not just a book about Lightman’s life. Nor is it a book just about Jewish identity, or feminism, or mental health, or fertility and parenthood. It is a book about how the stories about our past inevitably influence the potential of our future.

From Literature and Belief, L&B 40.2 & 41:1 2020 & 2021

What would you do if you were named after a biblical character but felt that your story was not being told, that your voice was not being heard? This is the underlying impetus for the luminous Book of Sarah, an autobiographical visual narrative by Dr Sarah Lightman, artist, curator and scholar. The book is many years in the making, as it has been distilled from thousands of drawings that comprised the artist’s visual diary, which she has been keeping since the mid-nineties, when she was a student at the Slade School of Art.

                                          Many creative artists draw on their own lives and experiences for                                                    their work. Few literally draw it, and of these few, even fewer do so                                                with the sense of nuance and fluid grace that Sarah Lightman                                                          displays. The ways in which she gives voice to the silenced, the                                                        marginalised, the unrecognised, in order to define herself, rather than                                            simply allow herself to be shaped by the wishes and desires of others                                              puts this firmly in the tradition of artistic resistance, of feminist                                                    midrash, but it is not only that.

The book opens with a sort of musical prelude of key themes, and an evocation of the powerful tensions between different layers or aspects of the self. One of these is a double page spread of a child’s shoe, painted so that we can see the discrete areas of colour, the line of the brush, the edges where light and shade meet. The painting is surrounded by layers of text. “You outgrow shoes” sits at the top – a direct address to the child who wears them. “I outgrow friends and religious beliefs,” runs along the bottom of the page (p.10), a metacommentary contrasting physical and emotional/psychological transformation. The book invites us to participate in and experience this growth, sometimes painful, from child to artist, partner to parent. These states of seeing and being also exist simultaneously for the artist, and be extension for the reader. The artwork throughout is beautifully reproduced so we can see every line of pencil or paint, and so feel involved in the narrative, in the sense of purpose and observation behind each image.

​

Lightman is particularly adept at using domestic objects in an explosive, subversive way, that recalls for me poet T.S Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative”, of objects embodying emotion. These objects point in multiple directions at the same time, such as the pencil sketched apple of knowledge, of first love, (p.67) that is surrounded by the blank space of dread and anxiety. The visible tentativeness of the pencil-line contrasts with its confident placing in the pictorial space.

​

This powerful emotional tension is enacted here in the

relationship between the drawing and the space which

surrounds it. This dynamic relationship shifts throughout

the work in a kind of visual music – so that when we get

another double page spread of a tea-service, representing

that cultural cornerstone of Britishness, we are surprised

by a lush, almost art-nouveau painted floral setting for

the pencil drawn objects (pages 114-115). “I made tea for

my grandparents in my flat. There’s a good feeling in

making things beautiful for others to enjoy. I had a new teapot for the occasion, it was a tea for them for all the teas they made for me.” This is the everyday charged with the force of ritual, an invitation by the artist to the older generation of her family into her own space, both physically and psychologically. This invitation to restore magic to the mundane, this symbolic re-enactment of the powerful meeting of generations, and of the aspects of self they represent, is also extended to the reader. The blank space often reflects anxiety, repetition, and the struggle not to be confined and defined by the mundane. It feels particularly poignant being re-read in lockdown London in 2020. There is a subtle shift as the narrative progresses, and these background spaces become filled with marks and textures, as the artist refines and defines the physical and emotional spaces around her. The “something beautiful for others to enjoy” could stand as a fitting description of the impact of her book, which is a beautiful object in itself, and lovely to hold and handle.

​

Lightman is adept at evoking both faces and physical places. The psychogeography of London and New York make them characters in her story, as what she looks at, what she notices and records, vivifies these iconic cities and renders them as signifiers for her personal journey, at once real and symbolic. Her pencilled childhood home “still inhabits her dreams” (p.41). This reminds me of poet Gaston Bachelard’s comment in his Poetics of Space, that the rooms we first inhabit shape our consciousness, especially if they “protect the dreamer.” Lightman’s book both depicts and recreates a therapeutic journey for the artist as a young woman as she encounters love and motherhood, and works to ensure that these do not define her.

​

                                                   The cognitive dissonance between what she draws and what                                                            she feels is a rich source of irony and humour in the book; “I                                                            was a religious Jewish girl thinking about falling in love, as I                                                            drew new Testament scenes” (p.73). There is a particular                                                                  tenderness in her drawings of celebrated paintings and                                                                    sculptures of the Madonna and Child, a frisson at following a                                                          Jewish feminist gaze responding to the ways Western art and                                                          culture have sought to define and appropriate motherhood.

These struggles for individuation and self-definition are given greater resonance by her struggles to conceive, and the dark emotional undertow that follows her into parenthood, when she is told to smile because she has beautiful stitches. The delicately drawn picture of a sleeping child acknowledges the effort that goes into the drawing itself, the struggle to retain and define space for herself; “You sleep. I can hardly move for tiredness.” (p.191) The simultaneity of joy and grief, of life and loss, are brought to vivid life by the loss of a beloved grandparent whilst dealing with new life and family, and the ways we try to come to terms grief as she cries in the bath “because you are in such pain.” There is a visual echo here of Freida Kahlo’s celebrated bath-painting, but Lightman’s watery image is an act of empathy, of tears mingling with a sense of birth and rebirth in the womblike space which she inhabits.

​

The profound intertextuality of her work, of the way she stitches together her influences and weaves them into her life, recall that of another brilliant comics artist, Alison Bechdel. There is a rich seam of visual and textual material with which Lightman’s work is in conversation. A presiding visual inspiration is the work of Charlotte Salomon, gifted artist and presiding deity of Jewish women’s visual autobiography. Her posthumously published work is carefully depicted, and there is a double page spread of carefully drawn covers of her literary and religious inspirations (pages 22-227). “I hear my voice amongst other women’s voices,” she writes, and makes sure that we do too.

​

This bravura display of creative intelligence functions as an alternative bible as the book is organised into sections evoking those of the Bible, but they have been re-ordered, re-woven to follow the trajectory of the artist finding her voice, ending hopefully and with powerful subjectivity in “Harry’s Genesis.” This is a deeply felt, deeply nourishing, engaging and articulate book about learning to see, and to be, as a person and an artist.  “I’m here. It’s better,” Lightman writes, and the deft emotional chiaroscuro of her work give us the life-affirming sense that she is absolutely right. My world is enriched, is tangibly better, because The Book of Sarah is a part of it.

“The Book of Sarah” is not your typical graphic novel. Instead of comic-book-style drawings it’s filled with charcoal and pencil illustrations and there are no panels. But that was Sarah Lightman’s plan all along.

The British artist and curator who won the Will Eisner Award for her 2014 book, “Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews,” divided her autobiographical graphic novel into biblical sections. The sections are: Genesis, Exodus, Bamidbar, Numbers, Leviticus, Harry’s Genesis (named after her son), Revelations and Apocrypha. The Book was shortlisted for the 2019 British Book Awards. 

Lightman spoke with the Journal about her fellow female graphic novelists, the matriarch she was named after and what she hopes to accomplish with her new work. 

Jewish Journal: Why did you decide to create “The Book of Sarah?” 

Sarah Lightman: I was an undergraduate at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. I felt really lost so I decided to go backward and draw my childhood to understand myself. I looked at family photos and tried to understand who I was in my family by the way we were standing. I did those drawings 20 years ago. I gave presentations with them, but I hadn’t discovered the world of comics. Even though I kept doing drawings about myself, I hadn’t seen anything similar apart from Charlotte Salomon’s work. I realized my work could fit into that world. She was basically the first autobiographical Jewish graphic novelist. Before she died in Auschwitz, she spent one year drawing her life story. Her drawings are amazing. 

JJ: Are there a lot of Jewish women in the comic book industry? 

SL: Jewish women have been making amazing work since the 1970s, but you only remember the men. Women often aren’t known. We get passed over all the time.

JJ: Do you think Sarah was overlooked in the Bible, since there wasn’t a book about her? 

SL: That’s what I argue. I felt about her story what I felt about myself — I wasn’t leading my own life. I was in someone else’s story. Like me, she was also an older mum. There’s contemporary literature written with her in mind. I found more as time went on. Once a lot of the biblical women began to become independent in the narrative, they were condemned and then ignored. Eve was condemned for wanting to learn more. 

With Sarah, she gets absorbed into Abraham’s great narrative. She’s a conduit through which the Jewish people are born. It’s Abraham who learns her name is going to be changed. It’s Abraham who converses with God. Sarah is deriving power through Abraham. Even when she talks about her baby, she says, “Who believes Abraham could have a baby at this age?” She’s often qualified in relation to the male characters. Sarah has power in my graphic novel. Women can take control of how other women are being presented in the arts and give them power and opportunity. 

JJ: Why did you decide to tell your story like the Five Books of Moses? 

SL: I wanted to take up space and see what it would be like if we followed women’s lives instead of the men. All those biblical texts, they’re just named after men. It’s all about Moses. It’s all through the male voice and scribe. I became a scribe for my own narrative. 

JJ: Did you draw everything at once or as you were experiencing it? 

SL: Apart from my childhood ones, everything was done pretty much as I lived it.

JJ: In the book, you talk about how you went from being secular to Orthodox and then to Reform. Where are you on your spiritual path today? 

SL: I like being in a Reform synagogue and choosing my own Jewish identity and affiliations. I like the fact that a woman is the head of the synagogue and we have a gay rabbi. There’s informal dress for the children’s services. It’s introducing my son to a world where you can be yourself. My academic work and writing are how I encounter being a Jewish woman. With my art, I’m constructing and deliberating my contribution to Jewish culture. 

JJ: You also touch upon your struggles with depression. How does it feel to reveal these struggles on the page? 

SL: It’s great to talk about these things. We’ve all lived lives where we’re not 100% pleased with what we’ve done, but that’s no reason to be upset about it. It helps people not feel alone when they read the book. We’re all figuring it out and asking how do we do it? The fact that life is such an imperfect science — we mess up, we hurt people’s feelings — doesn’t mean it’s something not to be shared. 

JJ: What do you hope people get out of reading your book? 

SL: I felt like I wanted to be myself in my book. The front cover has a painting on it, which is not like a typical graphic novel. Doing it that way was a bit brave and a breakthrough. You don’t have to fit into something like Orthodoxy or marriage or mothering. I figured out what I wanted to do for me, and that was fine. Finding your own way is a totally legitimate way to do things. 

Sarah Light­man is one of our lead­ing lights in Jew­ish-themed comix, both as a schol­ar and a prac­ti­tion­er. Light­man is a co-founder of the ​“Lay­deez do Comics” inter­na­tion­al forum for artists and also edi­tor of the ground­break­ing vol­ume, Graph­ic Details: Jew­ish Wom­en’s Con­fes­sion­al Comics in Essays and Inter­views, which grew out of an exhi­bi­tion that toured North Amer­i­ca. This vibrant col­lec­tion offered read­ers and edu­ca­tors unprece­dent­ed and deeply illu­mi­nat­ing glimpses into the art and life of eigh­teen inter­na­tion­al Jew­ish female artists whose work encom­pass­es a range of gen­res and styles. The Book of Sarah, which might best be described as a graph­ic auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but is in many ways a sub­ver­sion of the form, offers rich­ly tex­tured, lumi­nous and often raw and inti­mate win­dows into Lightman’s emer­gence as an artist and some­times tor­ment­ed younger self. Through­out this non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive, Light­man sit­u­ates her painstak­ing jour­ney from the Ortho­dox upbring­ing that sti­fled her auton­o­my and cre­ativ­i­ty, to her life as an inde­pen­dent artist amidst por­traits of Lon­don and New York City, as well as the fam­i­ly mem­bers and oth­er indi­vid­u­als intrin­sic to that growth.

Light­man report­ed­ly invest­ed decades cre­at­ing this work and one can sense that the out­come rep­re­sents a deep cathar­sis, enabling her to con­front deep and hard-gained inner truths. Though there is prob­a­bly no such thing as a ​“con­ven­tion­al” graph­ic nar­ra­tive, read­ers antic­i­pat­ing a ful­ly-reveal­ing mem­oir may find them­selves a lit­tle more chal­lenged by Lightman’s some­what more elu­sive and frag­men­tary approach to her sto­ry, but they will find myr­i­ad com­pen­sato­ry rewards. In lan­guage rang­ing from spare and col­lo­qui­al to lyri­cal, the artist exam­ines years of pain and inse­cu­ri­ty. But what will most enthrall read­ers is her lumi­nous imagery, beau­ti­ful­ly ren­der­ing her inti­mate rela­tion to every­day objects, indeli­ble aspects of fam­i­ly life, reli­gion and cul­ture. Light­man is the kind of gen­er­ous artist who cel­e­brates her relat­ed­ness to oth­ers and, sub­se­quent­ly, there are mov­ing homages to the artists, writ­ers and books that inspired her along the way.

Whim­sy and pathos often inter­min­gle through­out this bil­dungsro­man, begin­ning with chap­ter head­ings evok­ing bib­li­cal books, such as Gen­e­sis which com­mem­o­rates both fam­i­ly his­to­ry and her own ear­ly sense of self­hood, or Bamid­bar (In the Desert), the orig­i­nal Hebrew title of the Book of Num­bers, which explores her return to Lon­don fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous rela­tion­ship in New York. Else­where, she recounts her halt­ing progress in ther­a­py, the joys and ambiva­lences of moth­er­hood, and deeply per­son­al rev­e­la­tions about her life as a woman and artist. All of this is accom­plished through tru­ly haunt­ing art, much of which takes up entire pages. Reflect­ing on her art and life, Light­man once observed that, ​“I haven’t changed the world, or made a lot of mon­ey, or held an impor­tant posi­tion. But I have strug­gled, and lost, won and sur­vived, and that jour­ney mat­ters.” Any­one who has the plea­sure of spend­ing time in the com­pa­ny of her deeply absorb­ing book will like­ly agree.

Sarah Light­man’s gor­geous­ly con­struct­ed mem­oir fea­tures shad­ed images with stun­ning pops of col­or. These images and her qui­et but hon­est cap­tions show a life’s jour­ney reck­on­ing with reli­gion, love, fail­ure, and rela­tion­ships. The ques­tion of moth­er­hood comes up again and again, ask­ing read­ers to con­sid­er their own per­cep­tions of and rela­tion­ships with parents.

Raised in an observant Jewish household, Sarah Lightman realized that her biblical namesake, matriarch of her people, did not have a book of the bible named for her. In recognition and remedy, Lightman has named her book The Book of Sarah. The book is an idiosyncratic coming of age memoir in words and pictures, beginning at age ten. The quest for identity is a continuing thread as the narrative traces the author’s spiritual, social, and psychological evolutions in conjunction with her development and identity as an artist and, eventually, a feminist, mother and partner.

Physically, the book is handsome, a hard-covered volume with silky gloss paper and full color art. A dual exploration, of heritage and self, informs the work. In art school, young Sarah began a project, a ‘Scroll of Sarah,” by pointing out the fact that she shared a name with two great-grandmothers. But she questioned her own endeavor. “I asked myself, how could I draw a book of my life, when I didn’t know who I was? If I couldn’t hear my own voice over all those that surrounded me?”

As a young woman, she had a chance to live in New York, but still did not feel a sense of agency. “…I was waiting for permission to start my life” (78). She reiterates her frustration with her young self, observing, “I was a free animal who, having spent her whole life caged, would only walk in circles in this time of freedom, missing the protective walls of her enclosure” (88).

How much of her timidity was fostered by her upbringing? “You should know there is a history of parental intervention in my family…” as both her mother and her father had had their aspirations halted by disapproving parents (95). The author also has had to wrestle with periodic bouts of depression.

The author says of herself, “Things and spaces speak to me” (123). She makes them speak to the reader as well. Images of houses and apartments, book covers, and objects reverberate with emotion. A set of dining room chairs elucidates a family dynamic. A recurring trope of water glasses at half-mast cleverly illustrates emotional undercurrents. A series of self-portraits exposes fixations and depression.

The Book of Sarah is a story of one woman’s journey which will resonate with anyone who has struggled to achieve authenticity and power as a person and as an artist. Its honest, nuanced content can spark analysis, comparisons, and identification.

Sarah Lightman has built a reputation as an expert on Jewish women graphic artists, writing a PhD on the subject, curating exhibitions and lecturing around the world. Now, after many years in preparation, her own graphic novel, The Book of Sarah, has been published. But if you are expecting cartoon-like characters, speech bubbles and lots of images on every page, you will get a surprise.

As Lightman says: “This is not a normal comic book. I draw like an artist. It is transgressive of comics.” For each page of the The Book of Sarah contains reproductions of her beautiful art works, mostly intricately realised pencil drawings as she explores her life in a highly original manner with captions underneath in a font based on her handwriting.

Early in the book, Lightman writes: “Every year during my first three years at the Slade School of Art, I would read from that week’s portion of the Torah… I would mark down my questions and comments in the margins. And then I would travel on the tube to the Slade and show my drawings of my own life story.”

With siblings named Daniel and Esther, she questioned why both of their biblical namesakes had books named after them, but her namesake, the matriarch Sarah, did not. She was told: “You have a whole section of the Torah named after you, and the Torah is holier than the Writings of the Prophets… But still she demanded a Book of Sarah.” And this publication is the result. Most of the chapters reflect those in the Bible. Genesis tells of her family background and childhood, Exodus of her leaving London for New York, Bamidbar, the Hebrew title for the Book of Numbers, which translates as “In the desert”, deals with her return from New York after a failed relationship.

The book is a joy to read. Lightman goes into surprisingly personal details about her life including her failed relationships and some truly terrible dates. As she writes: “My drawing enables my catharsis but it is also a stick to beat myself with.”

Several pages are filled with drawings of plastic cups of water, filled to different levels which represent her meetings with her therapist. Under each glass are snippets of what she discussed in therapy.  When she meets her husband Charlie, she confides in her anxieties about both her wedding and her fertility.

When her son Harry is born, she alternates between recounting her love of her new son and the drawbacks of motherhood, including a very graphic image of her Caesarean scar. The drawings that accompany her musings include family portraits in a range of styles from realist to expressionist, the homes she has lived in and other key buildings in her life, covers of books that have inspired her and objects of importance to her — for example, a beautiful drawing of lace doilies inherited from her great-great-aunt accompanied by the reflection “I am just a stitch in time in my family’s intricately woven history.”

I found the drawings of the more banal subjects perhaps the most moving —a succession of pages showing the foods she eats in moments of stress or the packet of Osem chocolate covered wafers that she bought for her dying grandmother. The book ends on a positive note with a chapter called Revelations, which has Lightman preparing to give up her autobiographical drawings for painting.

Distilled from hundreds of intensely beautiful diary drawings into a compelling narrative of identity, The Book of Sarah is both a comfort and inspiration to anyone who wants to know how to belong as an artist to a family, a culture, and a religion.

This is about words and pictures. This is about what words say and what pictures describe. And this is also about how words and pictures reach for what is not physical; for what is felt, for what is, or sometimes is not, understood.

Sarah Lightman is an artist, an academic with a PhD from the University of Glasgow, an author, a wife, a mother (of Harry), a Jewish woman, a feminist, a daughter. And now Sarah Lightman is a graphic novelist.

I really loved this book and found it hard to put down. It was such an original mixture of beautiful line drawings and confessional raw emotion. On the one hand very personal and self reflective and on the other it manages to be both engaging and accessible.

Wow. I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, having just finished The Book of Sarah. What an accomplishment this is! I am absolutely blown away by beauty of the drawings, and the elegant succinctness of the text: (Sarah) signifies so much with sometimes just a few, beautifully drawn sentences. I particularly love the way each chapter moves from a blank page in an open book to a rich, fully drawn episode.

I am absolutely blown away. This is necessary reading for anyone interested in graphic non-fiction, Jewish feminism, literature and motherhood, London writing— actually, just for anyone. Read it!

Sarah Lightman’s long-anticipated project is here and it’s been well worth the wait. Lightman is, of course, the co-founder of the vitally important LDComics group and a former Broken Frontier Awards nominee for Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews.

Exploring the complexities of families, feminism, Judaism, motherhood and art this genuinely distinctive graphic narrative provides a fresh approach to autobio comics in a book that is deeply personal but always relatable. Look for a full review at Broken Frontier in the not too distant future.

Authored and illustrated by London-based artist and writer Sarah Lightman, The Book of Sarah collects a lifetime of work, distilling thousands of diary-esque drawings, and dating all the way back to her days as an art undergrad in 1996. It ranges from oil drawings to charcoal etchings, but mostly consists of exquisitely detailed pencil sketches of everyday objects (a toothbrush, an egg tray, a bottle of surface cleaner) and the people and places that make up her past and present life.

Named after the biblical matriarch and Lightman’s namesake, the title eludes to the no shortage of tomes dedicated to men in the Bible, amongst an absence of any dedicated to women. But unlike the Book of Daniel or Esther, The Book of Sarah is not a biblical epic in the traditional sense, but a personal reflection on religion, family, motherhood and what it takes to be an artist – complete with its own Genesis, Exodus and Revelations. The Book of Sarah is Lightman’s attempt to carve out a space that is all her own.

Each drawing is annotated by Lightman’s own observations, together forming a tapestry of her life from a young girl in Hampstead to present day motherhood. Poetically poignant contemplations that, much like the book’s biblical namesake, can be drawn wisdom and opened on any page.

A beautiful, resonant, gallery of a graphic memoir, Lightman’s modern graphic tome had already pulled in significant praise as a landmark publication.

Sarah Lightman will be doing talks and events throughout May which can be found on Myriad’s website, and her work will be exhibited at the Koppel Gallery until 4^th May.

A beautifully illustrated coming-of-age story, The Book of Sarah moves through the author/subject's life, examining her path from orthodox Judaism to her own, feminist version of her faith.

'Not every autobiographical comics artist is driven to create their own private book from the Bible. Sarah Lightman’s motivation came from her brother and sister having the Book of Daniel and the Scroll of Esther named after them, but there was no Book of Sarah, until now.'