My Alcoholic Escape from Reality by Kabi Nagata Review

Kabi Nagata’s latest memoir manga, My Alcoholic Escape From Reality, should really be called something like Dealing wIth the Consequences of Alcoholism as her drinking escalates to the point where she’s hospitalised with pancreatitis and fatty liver. The book follows her treatment and long road back to recovering her health.

The title led me to expect more about her spiral into alcoholism but the cover illustration is more indicative of the contents as Nagata spends most of the book in a hospital bed; only a small portion at the start covers her alcoholism. I was hoping for more drunk stories, exploring her reasoning behind these choices, hitting rock bottom and so on but I can see why she chose to keep all that stuff out of this book given what she reveals as you read and, regardless, this wasn’t a bad memoir even without it.

I felt really sorry for Nagata’s situation. Her drinking is a direct result of her previous memoirs causing her parents to cry and the guilt she felt after learning this. She tries to change that in this book by focusing her creative energies on making fiction, not memoir. It’s really sad that her being honest about who she is and expressing herself through her chosen creative medium were received so poorly by her nearest and dearest - no wonder she chose a way of numbing that pain.

While informative, the extensive descriptions of treatment at the hospital get a bit dull after a while, and her battle with herself over creating fiction or nonfiction manga got repetitive too. I also wonder if she was an alcoholic as she manages to control her drinking quite easily after leaving hospital. So it’s not even a story about overcoming addiction as she continues to drink, just in smaller amounts!

Still, I’m glad she overcame her demons and continued creating memoir manga. She’s clearly talented, both as a writer and an artist, with a strong narrative voice, and, though not a consistently compelling read, My Alcoholic Escape From Reality has enough to it for it to be worth checking out for fans of slice-of-life manga.