So Long Sad Love by Mirion Malle review – an irresistible celebration of female courage

A French cartoonist has doubts about her boyfriend in Mirion Malle’s third book in English, a striking hymn to women and solidarity

Enter the Faber/Observer/Graphica graphic short story prize 2024

I always read the acknowledgments first – is there anyone who doesn’t? – and thanks to this, I came to So Long Sad Love by the French-born, Canada-based cartoonist Mirion Malle half expecting to see women in corsets and long skirts falling madly in love with one another at the back end of the 18th century. But, alas, this was not to be, for all that Malle credits Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire as her inspiration for this, her third graphic novel to be published in English. While it’s certainly full of women, some of whom may (or may not) be about to fall in love, it’s also set resolutely in the now: an era when, courtesy of WhatsApp and Facebook, word of a bad man’s misdeeds may spread faster than wildfire at midnight.

Malle favours a soapy, forward momentum in her storytelling, and she can’t resist a neat, even a happy, ending. But I found her book irresistible for a different reason. This one celebrates female solidarity, something I feel more and more strongly about at the moment (would that it had arrived at my desk early enough to be included in an anthology I’ve edited on this subject). With its cast of smart, voluptuous female characters – Malle’s women are all eyes, mouths and hair – it reminds me, in the best way, of a classic of 1970s feminism: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, perhaps, or Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful. Like those writers, she understands the importance of our subterranean networks: grapevines that men, deeming women’s talk to be only gossip, underestimate at their peril.

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