By Rachel Abbott
If you’re a fan of Texan creators, graphic novels, or queer main characters, Austin-raised cartoonist Tillie Walden’s latest graphic novel is the fall release for you. Published in September 2019, Are You Listening? is a dreamy road trip story with modern flairs of magical realism. The book’s West Texas landscape oscillates between fantastical and familiar, and the characters will have you rooting for them to the very last page.
At its heart, the book is about two women on the run, who run into each other—and keep running together. Bea is a teenage runaway with nowhere to go but with an insistence on going regardless. Lou is a 27–year–old mechanic with family out West and a need to escape, if only for a little while. They meet on a preternaturally stormy night when Lou recognizes Bea at a pit stop. The women are from the same small town (Lou had worked on Bea’s parent’s car).
‘Are You Listening?’ by Tillie Walden, published by First Second in 2019.
Concerned for a girl out on her own, Lou insists on giving Bea a ride to her next stop. It is only after they arrive in Denton that Lou realizes Bea had named a town at random—she’s not running off to somewhere, she’s running away from something at home. Rather than leaving her in a strange town with only a backpack to her name, Lou lets Bea tag along with her to West Texas. Along the way, they encounter a missing cat miles from home, roads that undulate under their tires, and a mysterious group of agents intent on tracking them down. The landscape is changing, and so are they.
Like Walden’s first work, the graphic memoir Spinning, this book teems with quiet growth and emotional friction. As the road trip progresses, Bea and Lou discover that they’re both queer women in desperate need of time away from home. Yet, despite their similarities, the more Lou tries to draw Bea out of her shell, the more resistance she encounters. Lou openly grieves the loss of the mother that never knew she was gay; Bea silently bears the pain of an unnamed trauma. They struggle through a halting mentorship as Walden explores the nuance of found family.
Parallel to their emotional headbutting are the malevolent forces that emerge from the desert at night. Out on the roads, they’re hunted by a hostile group of men intent on taking their cat and driving them out of the West. The further the women drive, the faster their pursuers follow. The mystery of the novel is two-fold. Readers will race through the pages to find out both what happened to Bea and what the agents are hunting.
“But here, everything is listening. The road, the cloud, the trees… they know all your secrets. Everything you’ve seen is built by you. Which is why you’ll never see it again.”
Along with nailing the emotional beats of trauma and grief, Walden perfectly captures the surrealism of West Texas. The endless stretches of road, the horizon-to-horizon rolling hills, the vast nothingness between the infrequent gas stations and diners—Walden has rendered it all on the page. The landscape becomes a character of its own as the book dips in and out of magical realism. Towns disappear off the map and go missing from where they are supposed to be. The road itself lifts, stretches, and crumbles away from the earth beneath it, as if reality itself is breaking down. If driving through West Texas in real life teeters on the edge of surreal, Walden’s graphic novel provides just the right push to send the landscape tumbling into fantasy.
From the first page to the last, this book works. The explosive colors, the taut emotional energy, and the fantastical landscape weave a beautiful story of how running away can actually run you headlong into your problems—and, ultimately, into healing. Both the artistry and the storytelling strike their chords, turning this book into a symphony of illustrated literature. Bea and Lou’s journey is sure to stay with readers long after they’ve turned the final page.
