The Third Person (Graphic Novel) (2022)

Written and Illustrated by Emma Grove
Grade: B

Well, I learned a lot with this one.

Summary

We open in the winter of 2004, with Emma hoping to show her therapist Toby the new book she’s reading. However, Toby asks why she has decided to come to their session today as Emma. She’s confused at the question, so Toby tries to remind her of previous conversations with buzzwords like “parts”, “functions”, “Ed”, “Katina”, and her childhood. For a moment, Emma blacks out. When she wakes up, she changes the subject, bringing up her book again. Toby is confused because this wasn’t the focus of the conversation at all. Scrambling to look for her book, Emma has this vision that Toby stole it to play a trick on her, though this never happened. She works herself up because of it. We then go to Book One: Crazy. The first section is entitled “In the Closet”. At age thirteen, we see Emma as a young boy named Edgar. Privately in his room, he dresses as a woman while doing activities but is interrupted multiple times by his little brother who wants to tell him about his high score on a video game. Each time, Edgar frantically switches his clothes back before opening his bedroom door to talk to his brother. After the second time his brother bothers him, Edgar tells him to leave him alone for a bit until he’s done with a “project”. This only interests his brother in bothering him more. Fifteen minutes later, he walks in Edgar’s room without knocking, and he’s startled to see Edgar in women’s clothes. He threatens to tell their grandparents, so Edgar freaks out and begs him not to say anything. Thankfully, they come to a compromise. Edgar will switch back to his regular clothes to see his brother’s high score, and he won’t snitch on him.

Next, we go to a section entitled “On the Rocks”. Here, we see Edgar at age fifteen. Someone at work rechristens him “Ed”. At age sixteen, he tells his girlfriend that before he met her, he was a transvestite. She says that before him, she was a lesbian. Later, Ed’s co-worker criticizes him for giving his girlfriend oral all the time, and he finds this strange. Sometime after, Ed hangs with his older co-worker Zoe who takes him to a bar, despite him being very underage. It’s a very awkward situation (in a book full of them), and Ed’s naive nature doesn’t help things. The older Zoe clearly brought him there for a reason but is very short-tempered with him and encourages him to be more aggressive in his tone with her and such. She even tells Ed to tell her to “fuck off”, but he doesn’t want to. In the midst of the conversation, he blacks out. When he comes out of it, Ed mentions his girlfriend and things turn sour, so Zoe goes over to the other side of the bar to talk with some other guy friends. She comes back and tells Ed she’s going to have them kick his ass. Apparently, Ed told Zoe to “fuck off”, though he doesn’t remember saying it. Zoe tries to get Ed to explain himself to the guys, but he refuses to leave his seat at the bar because he knows he’s going to be jumped. Zoe goes back to them to tell, prompting Ed to consider a run for it. In the middle of this, Ed blacks out into his thoughts and another personality seems to have a conversation with him in his head.

He’s confused, but the voice tells him to ask anything. Eventually, he lands on asking this other, inner voice if he said “fuck off” to Zoe. The voice says he didn’t. However, a third voice in his head says she did. To the public in the bar, they can see Ed reacting to this conversation by moving around in his chair, so Zoe comes back to ask Ed what he’s doing. Ed admits he may have said “fuck off” to her, but it’s a voice in his head that said it. She passes him off as crazy and goes back to her guy friends to tell them. As Ed tries to process what is happening and argues with his inner voices, Zoe comes back and says the guys aren’t going to fight him now because he’s crazy. Plus, he’s just a kid. Zoe goes back to the other men to try and get laid, so Ed spends the time talking to the bartender. She tells him he did say it, but it seemed to be intended as a joke. Then, Ed’s voices come back. At the same time, Ed tells the bartender that the guys want to fight him. The bartender and Ed discuss how Ed works with Zoe at Food Mart, and she brought him here for fun. Now, the bartender sees things much more clearly, picking up on Zoe hitting on Ed unbeknownst to him. As a result, the bartender flips out on the guys and berates Zoe for putting a kid in this situation. Blacking out again, Ed wakes up to Zoe asking to not mention what happened. Ed doesn’t even remember the details as to what happened. Later, he talks to himself about how nice the bartender was to cool things down. On the drive home, Ed’s inner voice jumps out and says she told “that other bitch off for ya”. He blacks out and only remembers a phone call with his girlfriend Rachel, but it ended smoothly. Laying on his bed, he wonders what else he could’ve possibly said to Zoe, but he can’t remember. As he does this, his second personality lies next to him.

Next, we jump back to the bar scene where we see what actually happened between him and Zoe when he “blacked out”. This shows us the first detailed instance of Ed’s second personality taking over his body. Here, the second personality played a big part in the conversation with Zoe. Apparently, she was the one that reminded Ed about his girlfriend to threaten Zoe’s presence. This comes heavily into play because we see Zoe’s advances onto Ed and him not having it. This prompts Ed to finally lose it on Zoe, telling her to “fuck off”. He starts messing with her and escalating the situation, with Zoe not being able to handle this side of Ed at all. However, when Zoe counters by asking why Ed’s “loving” girlfriend isn’t there, Ed blacks out again. He wakes up, still in this second personality, to Zoe admitting how she was mad at Ed’s comments and tried to get her friends to get back at him.

Yes, they fully intended on jumping this kid.

Strangely enough, when Zoe asks for Ed to not talk about things, he yells how he’ll talk about anything he wants to. Then, he blacks out again. At work, there’s a complaint filed against Ed about his hair being too long. The manager tells him to either hide his hair under a hat or wear a ponytail. He instead decides to get a haircut, though he’s not too happy about it. In the section “Suede”, Ed sets up a P.O. box. One month later, he gets a shipment of a wig and a suede skirt. Later, he adds boots to the mix. At age 21, he goes out, fully dressed as a woman, to a club named “Katina’s” on gay night. He decides that when he’s dressed like this, Katina is the name he’ll go by. He continues these activities for two years, losing his virginity during this time period. Ed starts to feel guilty of his late-night life and considers seeing a therapist. After finally getting a meeting with one, he gets flashbacks to when he was in college in a “Psych 101” class. When a teacher tried to talk about transsexuals and the process of taking hormones, all the kids in class made jokes about it. Coming out of this blackout flashback and back to reality during his therapy session, Ed doesn’t feel comfortable with bringing up his issues with the therapist and leaves. In Book Two: Separate People, we learn about the different personalities Ed has. It starts in the “Katina” section. This is where “Ed” works and works extensively but when he goes out as a woman and has fun, it’s under the guise of “Katina”. It gives him severe headaches as a result. On one late night, he thanks his friend Dawn for covering his shift so he could go out with friends. Over the phone, he tells her he plans on transitioning to becoming a woman. Dawn pleads with him to stay as is, hoping to make some sort of relationship with him work.

Even so, Ed meets with his first gender therapist to start the process, since Ed has to be approved before he moves onto the next phase, but when asked about details from his childhood, he can’t remember anything. On the way home, “Katina”, the other personality, tells Ed how he doesn’t want to talk about his childhood, so he happily acquiesces to Katina. Because of this, he stops seeing the gender therapist and agrees to try things with Dawn. He tries, but it fails because he misses going out as a woman. He tries to introduce his “Katina” guise to Dawn’s child three months in, but they both admit it’s not working. A distraught Ed decides to go to another gender therapist to start things up again. His inner “Katina” tells Ed she will handle things with the therapist, so when he meets with him (the aforementioned Toby), the “Katina” personality takes over. Two months later, things seem to be going well with Toby. He asks if there is anything therapeutically, she would like to discuss, so Katina brings up how she forgets where she’s at sometimes and doesn’t remember how she got there, and she gets accused of saying things she doesn’t remember saying. Sometime later, Toby discovers the “guy” part of Katina and says they need to explore this further. In the “Ed” section, Ed goes to meet his therapist in “guy mode”. He talks about how he saw a male co-worker at the restaurant he works at slap a female co-worker, so Ed defended her and threatened to kick his ass, despite the other workers defending the male. The guy filed a complaint to H.R. about him. Ed fired back by telling the H.R. lady to talk to the female co-worker to clear things up. Thankfully, this resulted in the guy being fired. Despite things working out, Ed was startled as to why management took so long to do something.

Welcome to the real world Ed.

On another occasion, a co-worker’s father died, and she had to miss out on work. With a lot of bills piling up for this co-worker, Ed came up with the idea to make a collection from the other workers to help her. Unfortunately, since co-worker Vicki was the one that gave it to her, the girls all hugged each other, and Ed wasn’t given the credit. He’s even more annoyed because he missed out on the “fellow female bonding moment” because he was a guy. He wanted to be hugged like how women hug each other. Next, he talks about how miserable he is as a guy and how he’s tried to make things work.

In the “?” section, Ed walks into his appointment with Toby dressed as a woman but not as Katina. This is an entirely different female personality. She’s much more calmed down comparatively. We see “Katina” try to fight her way to the surface in a blackout moment, but this other personality tells her to chill out. The conversation is relatively pleasant, and she leaves with the promise of figuring out a new name to go out with. On the way home, this new personality argues with Katina about how it’s her turn to be in charge since she gave Katina two whole months. It’s important this goes well with the therapist because it’s the only way he’ll get his approval for hormone treatments. Even so, Katina promises the therapist will hurt her “because it’s what men do”. Later, Ed goes about a video store and sees 1996’s Emma. Seeing this as a much more passable name, he chooses this for his other female personality. In the “Emma” section, Ed enters his next appointment in the “Emma” personality, different wig and all. She tells Toby it’s easier for “us” to stick to one hairstyle. Toby questions how many more personalities are out there, with Emma saying it’s just her and Katina. When Toby asks about Ed, she says “we won’t talk about him”. After Toby turns down the offer to hear the book she’s reading, the two discuss Emma’s likes and hobbies and how she’s the total opposite of Katina, “the party girl”. She apologizes for referring to Katina in the third person but admits Katina is the third person, “the third person in the room who isn’t here”.

Emma makes a mental note of it. As you can see by the title of this book, she took this mental note to heart.

They discuss Katina being this third person, but Emma gets a little off topic. She talks about her love for writing and how she prefers to be at home reading compared to Katina’s clubbing and drinking. Toby, seeing this staunch difference between the two personalities, asks why she has chosen to come to the appointment as “Emma” today.

Toby talks about how he’s talked with Katina and Ed, but he wonders why “Emma” is here now. Once he brings up Emma’s childhood again, Emma blacks out. Once she wakes up from it, she reappears as Katina and changes the subject to clubbing. Toby still thinks this is Emma and is confused as to why she starts talking about all the things she just said she hated. Finally seeing this is someone new entirely, Toby asks for her permission to discuss her case with another colleague, and she agrees since he’s not going to use her name. When the appointment comes to a close, Toby brings up the name Emma and Katina has no idea what he’s talking about, even trashing the name. Realizing he has his hands full, Toby accepts this, choosing to gather himself for the next meeting they’ll have. On the way out, Toby gives Katina her book. Though she has no idea why she’s been given a book and has no memory of it beforehand, she accepts it and leaves. In the next session, Katina comes in and tells Toby she met Emma and clears things up about the differences between the two personalities. Later, Toby talks about how in their first session she brought up dissociative disorder mentioned in Jenny Boylan’s book. There, Boylan mentions “it’s one of the things you have to prove you don’t have in order to get approved for gender transition”. This is where Toby is having trouble because though Katina says she didn’t know anything about the disorder beforehand, he has trouble believing her and even suggests she may be acting. However, when he asks about what they talked about in their last session, she blacks out and returns as Emma talking about books. She then can’t find the one she’s looking for and accuses Toby of playing a trick on her. This prompts Toby to think she’s messing with him.

As you can see, these exhausting sessions will continue. Whether it’s Ed, Katina, or Emma, she will do anything to figure out a way to transition, but Toby becomes more and more frustrated as time moves on, dealing with three vastly different personalities that test his patience more than any other patient he’s ever had. It turns out, this D.I.D. (dissociative identity disorder) is very real, despite the probability of someone having it being low, and it has affected Edgar for most of his life. Therapy has never been more important than right now, but the key is patience, something no one in this situation seems to have.

My Thoughts:

The Third Person is not what I expected, but that’s a good thing.

I didn’t know what I was getting into regarding the subject matter, but I was fully hooked once the story became clearer. What started out as a person wanting to transition and going to therapy to make that happen, turned into a startling journey of a person not realizing the gravity of her own situation. Thinking transitioning will solve all her problems, her therapist Toby points out that they can’t even consider such a step before they clear the real issue at hand. Of course, this is dealing with the three different personalities this woman has created in her own head that encompass her everyday life. These personalities are all different from each other and all approach things in their own special ways. It’s the reason they were created, to help Edgar cope.

As Toby puts it, “different parts serve different functions”.

Ed exists to work and live life for others, basically financing the lifestyle of his other two personalities, Katina is the partier and aggressor who is overprotective of Emma, and Emma seems to the core person trying to make it to the front of the line. As things start to unravel further, we can see Emma is the one who wants to be the “main person”, but she has trouble dealing with the entanglements of life that Katina and Ed have a better handle on. Toby’s job becomes trying to get to Emma, so the right “core” takes center stage. It’s one hell of an uphill battle, especially for Toby because his handling of the situation sways from “breakthrough” to mediocre. He’s not as experienced as one would hope in the situation, but Emma prefers him because of how comfortable she is with him up until a certain point. Along with all of the other important topics regarding therapy, a crucial one that changes the story is Emma’s comfortability with Toby and how it impacts her trajectory. It comes to a breaking point (several times), despite how well he knows her story, and it leads her to the final stage of The Third Person that ends up saving her mental health from complete deterioration. It’s unexpected because we see so much of their working relationship, I was shocked to see it fall apart the way it did. If this was a regular story, a reconciliation would not only be expected but welcomed. Sadly, this is how it happened in real life which is why this book is harder to grade.

It sucks because we know Toby tried his best and him trying takes up a majority of the story, but you also see it as a necessary step. Would I have liked to see a final meeting between her and Toby for him to see firsthand that she’s okay? Yes, I would’ve felt a lot better, and I think he would’ve as well. However, this is the tough part of the narrative versus Grove’s story. If it’s entirely based on fact, she’s not going to put it in the story if it didn’t happen. Therefore, the book takes a hit, but it’s not her fault because this is just how it happened.

Anyway, it’s an ongoing battle in and around Ed’s head, as he continues to live life miserably trying to figure out how to get his hormone treatments approved. Unfortunately, the hurdle of D.I.D. is unbelievably tasking. I, like many reading The Third Person, had no idea about the details of this rare disorder, but it’s startling to say the least. If you ever wanted to see how important therapy is, along with getting the right therapist, look no further than this book. The focus isn’t just on transitioning, it’s about understanding a human being whose traumatic life has taken her on a rollercoaster ride very few human beings deal with. Because of this, others may find her story hard to comprehend. They need this book. This is a tale of understanding different perspectives on life, as well as seeing firsthand the pain one can endure from being another victim of humanity’s dark side. Everyone reacts differently to the depressing or angry moments and events in their lives, but Grove’s story is one that showcases this darker side of life people ignore. It can give insight on how deeply traumatic events can be for people who are wired a little different, as well as those who have experienced more pain and mental anguish in their lives because of an unstable environment and unsupportive people around them.

Once we get deep into these sessions, with a majority being with Toby, you will be drawn in. It’ll frustrate you, transfix you, and perplex you throughout the length of the book. The whole story is like a long puzzle which is only confirmed by Grove in the “Notes” section. In a fascinating blurb, she admits that she didn’t remember any of the chapters with Toby until thirteen years afterwards, despite it being the majority of the book. However, through some technique she learned, she was able to tap into her subconscious and write everything she remembered as Emma, and later as Katina and Ed. Each was done separately and when she couldn’t remember something, she left the picture as a black void. In doing so, she was able to put the entire story together from each perspective in a jigsaw-like puzzle, slowly piecing everything together. She was only able to do this separately because each personality was locked in a section in her brain. If you told me about this process alone, it would’ve interested me in reading the book before I opened a single page. The dedication it took to put this together and tell her story is inspiring, as well as impressive because of how difficult this was to pull off. Can you imagine digging into repressed memories for three different personalities? It’s unbelievable to say the least. Honestly, I can’t pretend to understand how difficult it would be for someone living with such a disorder for so long (very few can), but Grove did so well in recreating her life story in these easy-to-read pages that anyone can get a grasp on it.

This is another major positive.

I’ll admit that the main reason Grove’s unique memoir caught my attention was because of the art and how the narrative structure was laid out. I really liked how it was setup and presented. Despite such serious subjects and conversations being the focus, the simplistic nature of the presentation drew my eye to it. Full disclosure: I wouldn’t have read The Third Person if it was laid out in an autobiographical style. Grove’s art style was purely the reason I was drawn to it, giving me enough of an inclination to choose a book I would have never read before if it wasn’t so. Take a note authors, presentation is everything. With this, The Third Person was very easy it was to read. Each frame was important to understanding the emotions in the room of whatever character is involved, and each line was carefully constructed to recreate the tension of these real-life moments in Grove’s life. In doing so, I made sure I was fully attentive to every single picture. Sure, this may extend the length of the book to 900+ pages, but do not let that intimidate you. Anyone with an above average reading level can read this and understand the emotionally charged retelling of Grove’s life, and it can be (and should be) read in one sitting. It’s the only way to fully digest the material. Then again, with how the narrative is structured, you won’t want to put it down anyway. It’s engrossing, and each conversation she has with her therapist wants us to turn the page because we’re hoping for a satisfying conclusion of some sorts to happen.

Before the story begins, the author’s note added a whole different lens to see this book through. As its stated by Grove, none of this book is made up. The dialogue, internal dialogue, and all events taking place happened. Now, Grove states this because there is a lot of repetitive dialogue in the story, but in the defense of realism, a lot of dialogue in real life is repetitive. I do agree with her on this point, but I can’t help but admit that things do get tiresome midway through the story because of this inherent repetitiveness. The repeating of certain questions and responses make Toby that much more unlikable as time moves on, despite how badly he tries to help. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about this because though I understand his frustrations with the situation, I also wanted to slap him for being so damn rude at some points.

The Third Person isn’t perfect, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t invested in the story. Because of how easygoing the layout is, nothing stops you from reading it from the front cover to the back in one sitting. It sucks you in and the plight of Grove, and her relationships with her personalities and her therapists is truly captivating. Unfortunately, some of the therapy sessions seem to draw things out more than they should be, and the payoff was too much of a slow burn compared to the singular “bang” moment I felt the story was building up to. Now, if everything that happens in The Third Person is true like it’s said in the author’s note, I feel bad in saying that the ending is kind of boring. Obviously, it’s good to know now that Emma has figured out her disorder and overcame it to live this happy life she’s always wanted, but the finale seemed stretched out and uneventful. It needed some other scene to cap off the story. Regardless, you’ll take solace in seeing her finally being happy because that’s what it’s all about. Plus, the details of how the story came about (detailed by Grove herself) will outweigh most of the story issues one may have.

Basically, you won’t get bored no matter how you feel about the final product.