Author of
Past Tense:Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy (Avery, 2024)
Sky in Stereo Vol. 2 (Revival House Press, 2019)
Sky in Stereo (Revival House Press, 2015)
Sacha Mardou is a cartoonist and long-form graphic novelist who lives in St Louis, Missouri with her family. She began making mini-comics after getting her BA in English Literature from the University of Wales in 1998. Working in both fiction and autobiography, Mardou’s comics explore interior experiences such as mental illness, emotional dynamics within families and healing from trauma.
Sacha Mardou
Books by Sacha
Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy (Avery, 2024)
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 on the outside: happily married to the love of her life, enjoying motherhood and her six-year-old daughter, and her first book had just been published. But for reasons she couldn’t explain, the anxiety that had always plagued her only seemed to be getting worse and then, without warning, she began breaking out in incessant acne.
The product of a stoic, working-class British family, Sacha had a deeply seeded distrust of mental health treatment, but now, living the life she’d built in the US 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 hidden in the past but is still entangled in her present life.
Past Tense takes us inside Sacha’s therapy sessions, which over time become life-changing: She begins to come to terms with her turbulent and complicated upbringing, which centered around her now estranged father, who had a violent relationship with her mother and would later go to prison for sexually abusing her stepsister. With her therapist’s guidance, she sees how these wounds and other generational trauma has been passed through her family as far back as her grandmother’s experiences during The Blitz of World War Two. And she discovers modalities that powerfully shape her healing along the way, including the work of Bessel Van der Kolk and Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems).
As Sacha’s emotional life begins to unfreeze and she lets go of the shame she’s long held, she realizes that the work she’s doing and her love for her family can ripple outward too, changing her relationships now, and creating a new legacy for her daughter.
Bravely told, visceral, and profoundly moving, Past Tense is a story about our power to break free of the past--once and for all--and find hope.
Sky in Stereo Vol. 2 (Revival House Press, 2019)
Mardou returns with the second volume of her critically acclaimed graphic novel, Sky in Stereo. In Volume 2, 17-year-old Iris's LSD journey has ended behind the locked doors of a psychiatric ward. As she tries to make sense of hospital life and fellow patients, Iris is forced to confront her self while defiantly trying to find meaning and regain her freedom. With her usual visual flourish, Mardou takes the reader on a maze-like journey into the inner world of mental illness in this powerful and trippy coming-of-age story.
Sky in Stereo (Revival House Press, 2015)
Underneath the grey skies of Manchester, England, it’s the early 1990s and Iris is turning 18 and navigating her religious family, her studies, boyfriends and crummy jobs. A briefly transcendent LSD experience finds Iris unraveling on the page as her mundane reality becomes blurred by mental illness.