Reading Noelle Stevenson’s The Fire Never Goes Out was a cathartic affair. I picked it up during a particularly demanding week, emotionally speaking, in my life, and found a lot of the emotions I was experiencing at the time (good, bad, unseemly) echoed in this book. It helped give many of these messy feeling some semblance of shape and form, which in turn made me feel less like a vulnerable blob just floating in the void.⠀
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It was also a slightly surreal experience in the sense that this book is essentially a candid glance behind the curtains of a career and life of someone whose work has provided you with a great deal of amusement and delight over many years and, despite knowing that compassionate and lively art can come from grief and hardship, seeing it depicted in such a frank and vulnerable manner can still be somewhat of a shock to the system. The raw, intimate vignettes collected in this volume are as surprising and startling as they are engaging and illuminating.⠀
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The Fire Never Goes Out is a portrait, and a work in progress at that, in the truest sense of the term. It’s honestly been a privilege to watch Stevenson’s work grow all these years, and hope I get to see it evolve even further.⠀

Trigger warnings for: self-harm, body image issues, mental health discussions, homophobia, religious content, mass shooting mention