Meat and Bone

Verhoeven (Towerkind) explores the messy lives of four women as they struggle with their bodies, their selves, and the painful process of learning to heal and grow. Going through major breakups at the same time, three childhood friends—Anne, Gwen, and Jane—reunite and move into a new apartment together. But while Gwen throws herself into dubiously ethical polyamory and Jane seeks inner strength through weight lifting, Anne falls back into old habits of disordered eating, binging and starving by turns while torturing herself over high school traumas and her ex’s willowy new girlfriend. When Anne befriends her new neighbor, a striking, enigmatic waif named Marshall (a trans woman), the pair develop a desperate, codependent bond that threatens to consume them both. Marshall’s toxic, catty cruelty toward Anne (“your fat ass will never be like me”) verges on transphobic stereotyping, but Verhoeven narrowly avoids it, spilling forth both characters’ souls through her emotive, fluid cartooning, which renders their weight loss with empathetic melancholy. In her diverse artistic depictions of disordered thinking and eating, Verhoeven captures the silent wars of modern women, in all their pain and glory. [em](May) [/em]