Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy

A brave and captivating graphic memoir about the power of therapy to heal anxiety and generational trauma

When Sacha Mardou turned forty years old she was leading a life that looked perfect. But for reasons she couldn’t explain, the anxiety that had always plagued her only seemed to be getting worse, and then she began breaking out in terrible acne. The product of a stoic, working-class British family, Mardou had a deep-seated distrust of mental-health treatment, but now, living the life she’d built in the United States and desperate for relief, she finds herself in a therapist’s office for the first time. There she begins the real work of growing up: learning to understand her family of origin and the childhood trauma she thought she’d left in the past.