Young Raina also shares with her classmates her strategies for coping with fear, including deep breathing and concentrating on her feet. Therapy is about working on your own self, so what other people think is very secondary to how much you might get out of the experience. I love therapy I’m a huge fan! I think wanting to go is an extremely positive first step. Do you have any advice for people, of all ages, who might want to go to therapy but are intimidated by the attached stigma?

In Guts young Raina is, at first, afraid to tell her friends that she is going to therapy. Creating *Guts* was part of that journey. It took many years for me to learn to talk openly about anxiety. For a story about something taboo (anxiety and IBS), it was important to be able to show how things feel, how heavy thoughts are, even when the character isn’t able to properly describe or express them. The medium of comics allows the storyteller to play with words and images, as well as wordless images. What do you think it is about comics that allows you to tell this story in a way that truly resonates with readers?

When friends get to know me well, they hear about my guts! At this point in my career, my longtime readers knew me pretty well, too, so it felt like the right time to share. It’s a true story I’ve been telling for many years. How did you come to decide that it was time to share this story?

The story of Guts is obviously very personal. Her most recent graphic novel, Guts, is a New York Times bestseller and explores how her own anxiety manifested in the fourth grade - as a fear of vomit, or “emetophobia.” She’s a “YA rock star”, beloved by millions of readers of all ages - but especially tweens who feel seen and supported by her work. Raina Telgemeier is an author and illustrator based in San Francisco, California.

The book guts by raina telgemeier