BNP at Home Recommends: Couch Fiction

Writer: Philippa Perry / Artist: Junko Graat / Publisher During this quarantine, I find myself looking not only for new comics to read but also older ones to revisit. I, like many others I imagine, have a full bookshelf of tomes that were critically influential at one point in time and survived the culling of many moves just in case one day some mentions something off-hand, and I can excited, “Oh. I have a book that I can loan you.” And as it happened, as I was surveying my shelves for something to reread while lying on my couch this week, I found the appropriately named Couch Fiction. The book’s full title is Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy, and it is one of the earlier graphic novels I purchased when I was first getting into comics way back in 2010. It certainly also helped that I was an engineering major with a lot of ArtSci friends who were taking Intro to Psychology courses, and I needed something that wasn’t so fixated on numbers and figures. Couch Fiction is not a textbook, but it is written by an actual psychotherapist who penned this imaginary case study that followed one patient throughout the course of their therapy sessions, from the initial intake to the final farewell.

Yet, what distinguishes Couch Fiction is what happens just off panel. Perry has annotations underneath the panel that provides additional and further insight into psychotherapy practices. It’s kind of like a built-in director’s commentary that provides additional insight to the pro…