Constantly Reminded of What You Are: Commute by Erin Williams

Erin Williams’s graphic memoir is a vital and challenging meditation on the daily transgressions women face from men, writes Simon Shiel

Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams is at turns a harrowing, moving and revealing memoir of a woman who has navigated her way through alcoholism, depression and her own uncomfortable relationship with being the target of the male gaze. As a male reader, it is challenging in the very best of senses, and feels at turns like a howl of anger at a society rigged against women and a measured, razor-sharp dissection of the many micro-aggressions which colour something as straightforward as a journey to and from work. She writes: “It’s important that I keep you here, on this commute. I want you to understand what it’s like to be constantly reminded of what you are: desirable + visible or undesirable + invisible. With the first comes a constant and vague sense of threat. With the second comes loneliness. This is what it means to be a woman in public.”

Throughout the book, there were moments where I was struck by just how well the author captured small occurrences or interactions, such as the look of lust and contempt drawn across an older man’s face as she waits for her morning train. Her drawings have a jangly, fragile quality and with it she conveys the leer of the waiting man with a sparse, almost chilling simplicity. I was caught off guard by how powerful those few panels were. And they just keep coming, these little moments of malice, disregard and sexual predation on her commute which build and build, painting a picture of her own daily experience and the many complicated and troubling feelings it elicits.

It is through these moments that Williams reflects on her life and her relationships, how women can be defined through the male gaze, conditioned by the patriarchy to make herself appealing as an object and submissive to the wants of men. She recounts relationships, some small and large, some loving and some disturbing. Of one, she writes: “How much my willingness to comply with his sexual requests was predicated by my sense of obligation to him for frequently, literally, paying my way. I thought I was above that kind of cliché. I was not.”

It is a vital, painful meditation on the many transgressions women face from men who see their own sexual pleasure as the defining aspect of our society. Williams details many experiences which have marked her life: rape, abuse, gas lighting and sexual encounters which hover somewhere in a grey area between them all. She builds to a deeply affecting conclusion, tying together the cumulative weight of her own and others’ experiences. The power of those final pages have stayed with me in the weeks since reading.

Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams is published by Abrams.