A crowd-funded graphic novel by two Melbourne authors reflects the truth of sharing your life with others.

In an interview following the publication of Fun Home, graphic novelist Alison Bechdel spoke of the unique relationship between therapy and the production of autobiographical comics.

Therapy, Bechdel noted, involves learning a “psychoanalytic way of thinking”, interpreting “life as if it were a dream”. Even more than words on a page, illustrations can map to the contours of these grasping, half-formed dreamscapes. If the act of drawing is therapeutic in itself, the act of subsequently sharing those drawings can feel like offering direct entry to an interior world.

Alice Chipkin and Jessica Tavassoli (‘Tava”) are both keen followers of Bechdel, and Eyes Too Dry, their first shared graphic memoir, is structured around a deep desire to explore the limits and possibilities of making comics as a means to grapple with heavy feelings.

The memoir – which oscillates between passages written and illustrated by Tavassoli, and passages created by Chipkin – begins with its two authors attempting to determine where their shared story should begin, and what shape that story might take. For Tava, who has been wrestling with depression for six years, the narrative must start at least half a decade ago. For Alice, meanwhile, the story can only begin much later, at the point of her first interaction with Tava’s lows.

Initially, it feels as though Eyes Too Dry is predominately, even solely, Tava’s narrative. Rendered in magical, stylised line art, Tavassoli’s passages draw the reader into a dream world in which depression – its black holes and shadows and horns – is made real.

As the work continues, though, it becomes clear that Chipkin’s story – as Tava’s friend, housemate, collaborator, and caregiver – is just as necessary. Most often, our understanding of mental illness focusses on individuals, set far apart from others, grappling, alone, with their unknowable interiors.

Chipkin’s passages in Eyes Too Dry trace all the ways this is not so. In one fragment, Alice visits a counsellor to discuss strategies to help Tava, only to recognise, “by our second session it was clear I had my own head-mess to work through”.

Later, following a funeral, there is a switching of roles, and it is Tava’s experience with heavy feelings that enables her to provide Alice with necessary insight and acceptance. There are few stories that adequately capture what it means to act as a support person for those struggling with mental health problems, and Chipkin is frank about the challenges this form of caring entails, while also drawing attention to the complexity of attempting to delineate between ‘sickness’ and ‘wellness’, ‘carer’ and ‘cared-for’.

The creation of Eyes Too Dry is, fittingly, a core part of the work itself. As the memoir draws to a close, the pair retreat to a farmhouse off the coast of Canada, and we see Tava watching Alice, and Alice watching Tava, as they both attempt to put their experiences to paper.

On the one hand, the shared creative process acts as a form of catharsis – of bounding off, defining, and making sense of the challenges of two years in two lives – but it also represents a further entwinement. By the final pages, there is a sense in which the inner and outer lives of both authors fall away as the creative process draws their rhythms into sync.

This feeling, we know, must be temporary, but on the page, in the marks that have been made, it is permanent.