Rachel Ang is an artist and writer working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne, Australia). Their work has been published by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and kuš! Rachel’s first book Swimsuit was published by Glom Press in 2018, and they were a contributor to the Eisner Award–winning anthology Drawing Power: women’s stories of sexual violence, harassment, and survival in 2019. Rachel still lives in their hometown, where they draw comics and work in architecture.

In this interview, I chatted to Rachel about bodies, desire and sexuality in literature, the art of cartooning, and her breathtaking new book, I Ate the Whole World to Find You.

Author headshot by: Tatjana Plitt

Alex Creece: Hi Rachel, thanks so much for chatting with me! I’ve recently read your new graphic novel, I Ate the Whole World to Find You. It’s utterly brilliant. While I haven’t read your previous chapbook, Swimsuit, I noticed that it’s included in this novel, too.

How (if at all) does I Ate the Whole World to Find You serve as a continuation of the chapbook? And can you tell us about the character of Jenny as the protagonist of all these stories?

Rachel Ang: Thank you so much, Alex!

Yes, this is a continuation of previous work – there were a couple of stories that had been previously published, including Swimsuit and the story about the train going off the rails and imploding (The Passenger), which I originally used to pitch this book to my publisher.

But in adapting and redrawing these stories for the new context of I Ate the Whole World to Find You, I found that these stories were changed and morphed in different ways: either by the context of the newer stories, which created all these different shades of meaning and emotional depth to the central character; or my evolving drawing style, which feels a bit different to my drawings of five years ago, when I first conceived of those stories; or just being in a different mental space as an artist and a person.

For example, the ending of The Passenger changed from a despondent note about unrequited love, to being about Jenny gaining self-knowledge and taking action to escape from a situation that no longer serves her.

If you look at the original story of Swimsuit published in 2018, and this redrawn version, it maintains fidelity to the original, almost beat-to-beat and panel-to-panel the same (shown below). But I remember my editor and partner both commenting that this retelling feels much darker.

While the plot of Swimsuit didn’t change, my feelings about the story did – it became about Jenny’s complicity, or knowledge about how hierarchical our society is, how imbued with racial violence, but she is unable to speak about it. And to a certain extent, she is too self-involved, too distracted by her much smaller personal problems to notice what’s going on until it’s too late.

It’s important to me that Jenny moves through the world as an Asian person, in a minoritised body. And this feeling about the limits of language sets us up for the last story in the book, too, which explores a kind of aporia, and which also uses waters that protect, refract, obfuscate and break as a kind of device.

The kernel of our main character, Jenny, was contained in my older stories, but this book follows her through different life stages, from childhood, young adulthood, to impending parenthood. Knowing her on this deeper level has allowed me to treat her with more compassion, and I hope the reader is able to feel empathy for her, too.

Excerpt from Swimsuit (2018 panels left; 2025 panels right)

AC: The book features five separate-but-connected stories: Hunger, The Passenger, Your Shadow in the Dark, Swimsuit and Purity. How do these stories connect with and diverge from each other?

RA: The stories connect through a few threads sewn throughout: growing up, the inner child, labour, the search for love and acceptance, how the body moves in space and space moves through the body. But I think each story foregrounds different themes and diverges out on its own weird branch.

There are motifs that connect across the stories like water, reflections, curtains, thresholds and food.

AC: The first story, Hunger, navigates a feeder fetish. If you’re comfortable, what drew you to this topic?

Throughout the book, consumption is a strong theme – eating, swallowing, engulfing – and there are many surrealist elements relating to size, with Jenny becoming large and small at different times, in different ways. Can you speak to your interest in these themes?

RA: I’m interested in bodies changing, and consumption and control, so feeding is a fetish that really speaks to me, even if it’s not my particular kink. It was important to me to treat the feeding with respect and not kink-shame. Jenny tries to understand and even get into it.

I originally conceived of this story when I was in a classic doomed situationship – I had this unrequited love for someone who just didn’t return my feelings. I tried really hard to be the kind of person this love interest would find irresistible. Now that I’m older, I can see it’s a waste of time to try and shape yourself into someone else’s ideal, but this idea of trying to force oneself into a different form for someone else stayed with me.

There’s a kind of symmetry in this story – Jenny is trying to shape her friendship with this colleague into a romantic story, and they want to reshape her into a different form, too. Both of them want to make it work but they have these preconceptions in their heads of how things have to be, in order for them to be happy; and neither of them can fit those templates.

Excerpt from I Ate the Whole World to Find You (Hunger chapter)

AC: The book also touches on things like desire and attraction, as well as the impulses, anxieties and ethics that come along with these concepts.

Would you say that sexuality is a key exploration of your work? Why/why not?

RA: Yes, I am very interested in sexuality and desire.

Sex, and the urge to connect with others and the self, is such an interesting mode of inquiry – a petri dish for experiments and gaining knowledge about ourselves and our lusts and limits in the world.

Jenny’s desire for love, connection and freedom from shame is one of the key drivers of these stories. And each story is an opportunity to look at sex from another angle – encountering kink/fetish, shame and trauma, unrequited desire, procreation, and more.

AC: The way you use the page makes the emotions palpable – for example, the tangled, dynamic and overlapping elements of speech, your use of white space and the inability to ‘hear’ all the dialogue, and the competing of attentions with the pressure to ‘be present’.

What was the process of not only writing these stories, but representing them visually in a way that so effectively evokes this overwhelm of being alive?

RA: Thank you for noticing those things! It’s important to me to use all the visual tools available to me as a cartoonist; I think comics can do things that other media can’t.

My process for writing/drawing comics is quite standard for a cartoonist – I write a kind of script which has the beats the story needs to hit, and dialogue, but I don’t necessarily know how I’ll make it work. It’s in the next stages of thumbnailing (this is like storyboarding — drawing each page really small and rough), pencilling and then the final art that I figure out the physical and spatial details, like the characters moving like chess pieces across the board, or turning into dogs, or Jenny giving birth to herself, or the way speech bubbles appear and interact with each other.

I have a lot of influences who are real masters of the comics form, and they inspire the way I try to use the page, like Lale Westvind for movement and gesture and speed, Aidan Koch for use of silence and negative space, Jillian Tamaki for facial expressions and the way her characters move through spaces and panels.

Excerpt from The Passenger.

AC: On a similar note, there’s an interiority to Jenny’s world that clashes with the demands of other characters and worldly (or non-worldly) intrusions – even that of memory and dreams. It feels like all material consumed by a person – life events, pop culture, ruminations, and so forth – is swishing around in a big potluck soup. Animals begin to talk, the Monopoly Man interrupts a work break, and Wallace and Gromit weigh in on life coaching platitudes, toxic productivity and wellness culture.

I spoke to Eileen Myles a while ago (not a brag!), who said: “I feel like everything is a puppet. All the objects in our homes are ready to speak. I think a really good writing practice is to observe things as a play – have the couch talking and the vertical shades behind you talking. And then suddenly, your glasses start saying something. So, I think of the whole anima.”

I was reminded of this quote as I read your book. Do you have any thoughts about this sort of puppetry/animation of the world, and its relationship to dreaming and waking life?

RA: I think it’s okay to brag about speaking to Eileen Myles!

A tension in the story and within Jenny’s character is what she really wants, which is opaque to her, and what she gets. She doesn’t really know or articulate her needs or desires clearly. The inside and outside are incongruent, and that comes out in a kind of dream logic, the surreal happenings that you describe, where the membrane between past and present, real and unreal is permeable.

I do sometimes think about everything as puppets. I think something Myles is touching on in that quote is the potentiality of everything – every thing has an opportunity to be part of the story. There are infinite strings on which you can pull, and that’s an exciting and polymorphous state of mind for a writer to be in.

A big touchstone for me in working on these stories was the 1999 film Being John Malkovich, in which there’s a lot of puppetry – puppetry of people, sex and manipulation, and especially being able to move into a portal (into another’s mind) that spits you out next to a turnpike… it’s just too good!

Excerpt from Your Shadow in the Dark.

AC: In Your Shadow in the Dark, I was really interested in the relationship between Jenny and her cousin, Willow. The story deals with chronic illness, feminism, child abuse, misogyny and family. Swimsuit also navigates everyday violence and being a bystander.

Your attention to detail, and your tenderness in storytelling, is such an art. How do you navigate writing about traumatic incidents with sensitivity? And how do you look after yourself as an artist when dealing with potential triggering material?

RA: It is challenging, and I try to treat my characters with tenderness and compassion. But I also think that sometimes it can actually be easier to look at something painful in an indirect way, for example, through fiction. I think that’s how Perseus was able to defeat the Medusa, right? By looking at her fearsome face only through the reflection of his polished shield.

Sometimes, after you have created something new, an artwork that lives outside of yourself but inspired by those original painful feelings, it can be its own form of healing. I also like (and I’m aware this sounds like I’m joking given some of the stories) to swim laps at our local pool as a form of mental hygiene.

AC: As mentioned, bodies are a big part of the book – eating, birthing, swimming, fucking, and so on. Purity explores pregnancy in a uniquely intimate and bodily-focused narrative.

How did this story come about? And (if you feel comfy answering), do you feel like it connects to your own experiences (or anxieties) regarding birth and parenthood?

RA: This story went through so many iterations and versions.

At first, it was a kind of speculative fiction story about a pandemic (I started writing it in 2021), in which a virus makes everyone on the planet unable to utter unoriginal sentences. Maybe it was brought by aliens. I was really inspired by the film Arrival, which is based on a Ted Chiang story. It was more explicitly about the failings or limits of language to communicate.

Then it changed and was more about pregnancy, Jenny gravid with this unknown future, and the impossibility of expressing what this stage of life is like. It’s funny to me that almost all media around pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood is so naff and tasteful and cute when it’s the most brutal, unspeakable, scary thing I’ve ever been through!

I was really struggling for years to turn these ideas into a story – it wasn’t coming together at all. And then strangely, I had a miscarriage and a kind of breakdown, and suddenly something in me unlocked. I was able to write this story in such a way that it felt real to me, but also open-ended and ambiguous. It hopefully serves to bring the stories together in a satisfying denouement.

AC: Lastly, what do you hope readers take away from the book?

RA: I’m not sure! I hope they feel a sense of loving tenderness and appreciation for the potentials of our bodies, which are so infinite and beleaguered. We put them through so much, and yet they continue to take care of us.

I Ate the Whole World to Find You is out now in all good bookstores, or online through Scribe.