Walking Distance by Lizzy Stewart

Walking Distance by Lizzy Stewart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Existing within the city – within the world – is often no simple nor straightforward thing, particularly for a woman and Walking Distance by Lizzy Stewart is no simple nor straightforward thing. It is a complex, challenging, reflexive, and occasionally deeply wonderful meditation on life within the city. On taking the streets that “would make your parents uneasy”. On taking up space. On being.

There’s a rich heritage to this sort of thing ranging from Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin through to A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, and, I think, those eternal stories see a young woman trying to figure out who she wishes to be in the world whilst the world threatens to move on without her. I’m trying not to say ‘things like Bridget Jones’ but I am essentially saying ‘things like Bridget Jones’. Some of the spreads where Stewart looks at herself as much as the world about her are precious moments of story where her lines and colours move as much as the text itself.

I think that notion of movement is key here; this is a comic that moves, whether that’s those delicious moments of abstraction that conjure stormy skies and the Thames in the same breadth, or a panel with a figure in the distant corners of a housing estate. A woman existing, with something she is moving from and something she is going to. A woman with story, whether that’s Meryl Streep or Nola Darling. I was intrigued to see how Stewart navigated her story; this is a text that could be read as being “of woman” (in those readings that we see so often and sometimes so reductively applied to women writing about womenish things…). Stewart works hard to question that kind of globalist reading, recognising that she can not speak for other women’s experiences within the city and only her own. And yet there’s a strength in that singularity, a fascination in it that the book almost seems shy or nervous of recognising.

I think what I’m reaching for her is the notion of an echo, a ripple. A pebble dropped in the middle of an ocean. An impact made. An articulation of a moment; a parallel found. A slight, slender thread in the messy, complicated dark. A story of the individual, but also a story of us, of all of us.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.

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