My Body in Pieces

A deeply emotional graphic memoir of a young woman's struggles with self-esteem and body image issues.

All Marie-Noëlle wants is to be thin and beautiful. She wishes that her thighs were slimmer, that her stomach lay flatter. Maybe then her parents wouldn't make fun of her eating habits at family dinners, the girls at school wouldn't call her ugly, and the boy she likes would ask her out. This all-too-relatable memoir follows Marie-Noëlle from childhood to her twenties, as she navigates what it means to be born into a body that doesn't fall within society's beauty standards.

When, as a young teen, Marie-Noëlle begins a fitness regime in an effort to change her body, her obsession with her weight and size only grows and she begins having suicidal thoughts. Fortunately for Marie-Noëlle, a friend points her in the direction of therapy, and slowly, she begins to realize that she doesn't need the approval of others to feel whole.

Marie-Noëlle Hébert's debut graphic memoir is visually stunning and drawn entirely in graphite pencil, depicting a deeply personal and emotional journey that encourages us to all be ourselves without apology.

Key Text Features
graphic novel
comic style

Shelley Tanaka is an award-winning author, translator and editor who has written and translated more than thirty books for children and young adults. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Shelley lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Marie-Noëlle Hébert lives in Montreal. Largely self-taught, she studied advertising illustration at Collège Salette. She did a series of illustrations for the documentary Carricks, dans le sillage des Irlan­dais by Viveka Melki (Tortuga films, 2017) and illustrated the children's book Le voyage de Kalak (Cuento de luz, 2018). My Body in Pieces is her first graphic novel.