Anxietyland
Gemma Correll✦Eric’s guide
This isn't a book that tells you it gets better — it's a book that draws you a map of the worst ride in the park and sits next to you, cracking jokes the whole way down.
The story
In this graphic memoir, cartoonist Gemma Correll maps her lifelong experience of anxiety and panic onto a sprawling, darkly whimsical theme park. The narrative moves between a 2018 mental-health crisis that lands her in a partial-hospitalization program, flashbacks to childhood rituals and adult agoraphobia, and satirical park-attraction comics like the Worry-Go-Round. It’s a 448-page illustrated journey through the exhausting, absurd, and occasionally funny machinery of a worried mind.
Plenty of readers find it repetitive — the same psych-ward meetings, the same spirals, cycling through nearly 450 pages — and I get it: if you're looking for a tight, propulsive plot, this will test your patience. But that repetition is also the book's quietest, most honest argument: anxiety doesn't follow a neat arc, and Correll refuses to fake one. The amusement-park frame lets her do something clever — she can be grim and ridiculous in the same panel, which is closer to how a panic attack actually feels than any tidy recovery story. Read it if you want company, not a cure; skip it if you need a narrative that moves.
- Treat this less like a novel and more like a long, rambling walk with a friend who draws — the structure is deliberately circular, not climactic.
- Hold the 'relatable' praise lightly. If you don't have anxiety, the book may feel like a foreign documentary; if you do, it may hit uncomfortably close. Either way, don't expect it to explain itself to you.
- Notice the park metaphor isn't just decoration — it's a coping mechanism. Ask yourself as you read: is she using humor to distance herself from the pain, or to get closer to it?
- The way Correll draws her own face — especially the eyes. In panic scenes they go wide and blank; in the park-gag strips they're deadpan slits. The shift tells you which mode she's in before the words do.
- Recurring visual motifs: the 'worry-go-round,' the downward spiral, the booze cruise. Track how these same images return in different contexts — childhood, the hospital, adult life — and whether they change meaning or just keep spinning.
- The dialogue in the partial-hospitalization scenes. It's quick, witty, and often deflective — watch for the moments when a joke lands badly or someone refuses to laugh. Those silences do a lot of work.
- The page density. Some spreads are airy, single-image jokes; others are crammed with small panels and handwritten text. The rhythm of that density mirrors the mental state — cluttered pages for cluttered days.
- Correll gives you coping tools drawn in the margins — breathing exercises, grounding techniques. Did any of them land for you, or did they feel like obligatory self-help garnish on a memoir that otherwise refuses to be useful?
- The book has been compared to Allie Brosh and Roz Chast. If you know their work, where does Correll diverge? Is her humor more defensive, more British, more resigned?
- That 448-page length — some readers wished she'd cut a hundred pages. If you were the editor, what would you trim? And what would you lose if you did?
- The park metaphor: by the end, is it a prison she's trapped in, a playground she's learned to navigate, or something messier than either?
Warming up Anxietyland…