Blossoms and Bones: Drawing a Life Back Together

By Kim Krans

Visionary artist and New York Times bestselling author of The Wild Unknown Kim Krans returns with a decadently illustrated and incredibly raw graphic memoir that chronicles her multi-layered search for truth and recovery from an eating disorder and infertility in the throes of a health and wellness-obsessed culture, touching on the healing potentials of creativity and spirituality. 

With pen and paper as her trusted allies, revered visionary artist, spiritual seeker, and bestselling author of The Wild Unknown, Kim Krans chronicles her deeply personal journey of recovery through drawing.

After cancelling her flight home to wellness-obsessed Los Angeles, where Krans had been secretly experiencing a debilitating eating disorder, she finds her way to an ashram and seeks spiritual and creative refuge. For forty days she relies on “drawing the feeling” as a way to realign her relationship to food, addiction, fertility, perfectionism, and the endless messaging of “never enough” echoing throughout current culture. She makes the ashram her home and embarks on the healing process through intricately hand-drawn narration of both her inner and outer worlds, cancelling forthcoming high-profile teaching obligations and international travel. Radical simplification, meditation, community, and creativity bring her through the darkest chapter of her life. 

What emerges from Krans’ deeply personal undertaking is a raw and beautiful never-before-seen artists’ document that explores what it means to prioritize truth and self-discovery in a world of relentless expectations and distractions. A memoir at its heart, Blossoms and Bones is a lifeline of light and beauty, a call to embrace our creative power, and a courageous example of realigning with one’s destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062986399

Kim Krans

KIM KRANS is a visionary artist, author, and creator of the New York Times bestseller The Wild Unknown Tarot, The Wild Unknown Animal Spirit, The Wild Unknown Journal, and The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook. She is also the author of several children’s books, including Hello Sacred Life and ABC Dream. Krans received her BFA in drawing at Cooper Union in NYC, MFA in mixed media at Hunter College, and a MA in depth psychology and creativity at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Her seeker's heart has brought her to study in-depth practices of yoga and shamanism in India, Africa, Europe, and the UK. Kim teaches events and workshops that activate the forces of creativity and radical transformation through art, meditation, mysticism, and movement. See more at kimkrans.com

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Reviews for Blossoms and Bones

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

graphic memoir; one woman's experiences dealing with her eating disorder and grief

feels anticlimactic at the end, but I think this is due to the author's merely trying to represent her experiences faithfully without minimal editing if any. She includes a lot of her dark thoughts and anxiety so I felt this was a valuable account for the sake of #mentalhealthawareness

[villemezbrown · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Kim Krans had an awful year involving infertility, miscarriage, and divorce that led to midlife crisis, depression, an eating disorder, and this book. I feel sorry for what she has undergone, and some readers will probably find this "raw graphic memoir" with its mission statement of "drawing the feeling" to be quite moving. There are some individual pages that are quite remarkable.Unfortunately, I'm a cynical old bastard and mostly found the "raw" to be messy, the "graphic" to be scribbly, and the "memoir" to be sketchy, withholding, and at times a sort of hair shirt performance piece.From what I can glean, Krans dropped out of her daily life to live in an ashram in Pennsylvania for a month while producing this book as a daily diary of her emotional state. It's a variation on the 24-hour comic that has been around for decades. She seems to begin the project aware that she is producing a book, going so far to include a draft for the cover on page 30, just three days into her stay. She does not disclose in the book whether she has already sold the project to a publisher as she begins or is producing it on spec to shop around afterward. I was curious about the ashram, so I checked the website of the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and their current posted rates are $160/day for single room with an additional fee of $40/day for amenities (meals, classes, etc.), meaning a 30-day retreat would run $6,000. Also, her stay in the ashram followed a two-week trip to India just two months previous (And there is a New York City sublet in play throughout this?) Admittedly, I don't know what Himalaya Institute rates were in April 2019 or if Krans had some sort of discount, publisher's advance, or other subsidy to cover her stay, but I find myself distracted by all the above, wondering what role finances and/or a possible deadline played in the production of the book. Having read several books about antiracism in the last few weeks, I'm additionally distracted as I consider the cultural appropriation aspects of Krans' obsession with the spirituality and alternative medicines of India and other countries.When I could focus on the pages of the book, I found much of them devoted to a skeletal stand-in for the author, which creates an odd dissonance in a work that repeatedly stresses "truth" and not filtering. And I was a bit flummoxed by the climax of the book -- teased repeatedly throughout -- being an immense gratitude for oatmeal preparation.Bottom line: This book was not for me, but I do not deny that others may find it compelling or cathartic.