woman line

Usually, when I think about myself as a boy, I tend to think of him as a completely different person to me. I’m just some random middle-aged bloke who inherited his memories. And his schoolbooks. But when I look at these books, I find I very rarely have any direct memories of writing them. Most of the things I say about them are things I’m extrapolating from what’s on the page. This is a rare occasion when I do actually have a memory. It’s vague but it’s painful, so it must be real. You might have noticed there’s a woman in the picture. The title at the top even says “Which line leads to the woman?” You might also have noticed I don’t normally draw women. Most of my pictures so far have been of men in superhero costumes or bizarre creatures with weird crazy faces. I don’t remember why I chose to draw a woman this particular day. Maybe I realised I hadn’t tried to do it before. Maybe I just wanted to shake things up a bit, add a bit of variety to my stupid, unsolvable puzzles. But whatever the reason, I do remember regretting the decision. I just found it so insanely difficult. It was the breasts. I was eight years old and I’d never drawn breasts before. I’m not sure I’d even thought about breasts before. But here I was, drawing a woman and suddenly realising that if I wanted to do it properly, I’d have to draw some breasts. And even though no one knew about this but me, it was so, so deeply embarrassing. I hesitated, wondering if maybe I could get away with not drawing any breasts - you can even see the line if you look, where I almost drew her completely flat-chested - but in the end I took a big gulp and had a go. She was in profile so it was only really one breast anyway. And, having got through it, I made a vow never to attempt to draw a woman again until I was really, truly ready. Consequently, this is one of only a handful of pictures of women in any of my Fairburn books. They’re slightly more plentiful later on, but only after I realised I could draw stylised cartoon women without breasts and no one would judge me harshly for it. Bizarrely, the puzzle itself is a weird kind of metaphor for the struggle I was going through. Which line leads to the woman? Well, one of them’s clearly supposed to, but God knows which one it is, so I may as well not bother. If I’d been a teenager, this would be a cute, almost profound commentary on puberty and/or sexual frustration. But I was eight and had no interest in girls whatsoever, so it’s just rubbish. OK, OK, I’ll be less harsh on myself. I do remember something else. I remember I was excited about this page, because I was absolutely damn certain I’d invented a completely new type of puzzle. Just like a maze, but with lines instead of corridors, which made it easier to draw and gave us a much crazier picture - like a massive scribble, but with purpose. I’d tried a small version a couple of pages ago and now it was time to test out a big one. And then I did it. And I saw that it was bad. And I never did another one again.