When you read the graphic memoir Honor Girl, you step into a world where Civil War reenactments, the Backstreet Boys, gunslinging, and lunchtime sex polls are your daily concerns. Sound familiar? Of course not. This is Maggie Thrash’s story, not yours.
- Reviewer: GraysonTice - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - April 17, 2020 Subject: The Honor Girl. A sweet story of a girl that sets out to redeem her father and brothers from squalor and bad habits. Immensely enjoyed this book!
- Candlewick Press, 2015 - YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION - 267 pages. 'Thrash has so carefully and skillfully captured a universal moment. A luminescent memoir.
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- Maggie Thrash grew up in the South. She is the author of the graphic memoir Honor Girl, which is her coming out story. Strange Truth and Strange Lies were inspired by her experiences at an exclusive prep school in Atlanta, where everyone had secrets. You can also find her on lonercomics.com and on instagram @maggiethrash.
Honor Girl, by Maggie Thrash, is the true story of a summer she spent at camp when she was fifteen. During this particular summer, she meets a female counselor and begins to have feelings for her. This is the first time she's had any feelings for a girl, and since Maggie's a.
Honor Girl
It’s the year 2000, and Thrash is 15. She’s spending yet another summer at Camp Bellflower, a Christian girls' camp in Kentucky that both her mother and grandmother attended as teens. The camp is steeped in Southern tradition and strict social structure—all the campers wear uniforms, they pray constantly, and each year one especially obedient, God-fearing camper is appointed the coveted, but laughable, title “Honor Girl.” In general no one breaks any rules, not even to buy a Coke from the counselors’ vending machine. So when Thrash develops a crush on Erin—a 19-year-old female counselor—the veil of upright, church-going heteronormativity that the camp prides itself on is torn, and Maggie becomes an awkward, tongue-tied, somnambulating version of herself.
Thrash, a staff writer for Rookie Magazine, is clearly no SVA graduate. But that’s not a dig on her drawing skills. It is just to say that whether she lacks or doesn’t give a crap about slick art-school-style drafting techniques, she’s really a storyteller, and a strong one. Thrash certainly has drawing skills, but they’re her own, and they’re specifically savvy for the story she is telling. Her bare-bones line drawings colored with watercolor pencils seem to be channeled directly from her 15-year-old self. The drawings have the rawness and bright-eyed directness of the teenager depicted in them, who can’t hide behind a catalog of romantic experience and mastery. This is part of the brilliance of the comic medium itself—the way images work in concert with the literal to tell a deeper, much richer story—and Thrash really hits the mark with it. The drawings are so believably vulnerable, which is maybe why her story feels so devastating.
Counselor Erin is a cool, confident, astronomy major from Boulder, Colorado. She plays guitar, and is good at math. She knows her way amongst the stars. Conversely, Maggie sleepwalks outside at night—subconsciously desiring to join Erin’s world of stars and astronomy, but knows nothing about the math of it, or how to orient herself. Erin looms as the potential guide for Maggie on her attempted forays into the starry night of youth and love. But even though the two girls are clearly drawn to each other, Erin won’t play the role of mentor to Maggie’s child seeker.
Sadly, Erin and Maggie never even kiss. Not even when they meet again two years after Camp Bellflower, when Maggie is nearly 18, which is where the story ends. Maggie and Erin spend the day together and repeat their pattern of lapsed moments and missed intimacies. Maggie still hasn’t yet discovered the ways in which love is a partnership, and remains passive and timid, letting moments with Erin disappear before they even happen. After Erin drops her off, Maggie sulks at a bar somewhere in New Mexico, drinking Shirley Temples, waiting and hoping for Erin to come back for her. But she doesn’t.
“Not every moment has to happen,” she says to justify her passivity.
Honor Girl doesn’t just hand your heart to you on a platter. It makes you laugh, uncomfortably at times, and there are even a few empowering moments for our love-sick teen protagonist. Namely, Maggie’s brief stint as a drag performer, embodying Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys, and achieving her Distinguished Expert certification from the NRA, by accident no less. Make no mistake, the passive devastation of this story is absolutely gut-wrenching, so be prepared to read the book in a safe space where you can moan and curse out loud like I did. However, unlike so many trite stories of love, this one stands out as a truer, more likely scenario. If you don’t let people know that they are wanted, they will go away. Love relationships are fragile opportunities. They need care and attention. They need those moments to happen.
Monica McKelvey Johnson is a writer, comic artist, and sitcom devotee living in Brooklyn, NY. She writes a monthly series for The Rumpus called Fresh Comics, publishes comics as Wool & Brick Press, and is co-curating an exhibition in 2016 for the Interference Archive called Our Comics, Ourselves: Identity, Expression and Representation in Comic Art. You can find her on Twitter @woolandbrick.
Overview
Honor Girl Summary
All-girl camp. First love. First heartbreak. At once romantic and devastating, brutally honest and full of humor, this graphic-novel memoir is a debut of the rarest sort.
Maggie Thrash has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She’s from Atlanta, she’s never kissed a guy, she’s into Backstreet Boys in a really deep way, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing . . . until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent physical contact pulls Maggie into a gut-twisting love for an older, wiser, and most surprising of all (at least to Maggie), female counselor named Erin. But Camp Bellflower is an impossible place for a girl to fall in love with another girl, and Maggie’s savant-like proficiency at the camp’s rifle range is the only thing keeping her heart from exploding. When it seems as if Erin maybe feels the same way about Maggie, it’s too much for both Maggie and Camp Bellflower to handle, let alone to understand.