Graphic Novel Review: Passport: A Graphic Memoir by Sophia Glock

Posted on June 30, 2022 at 6:17 am by Gene Ambaum

Passport: A Graphic Memoir by Sophia Glock. Little, Brown and Company, 2021. 9780316458986. Includes and author’s note at the end plus a blacked out version of Glock’s passport.

This is Sophia Glock’s graphic memoir about growing up in various unnamed places, all of which I think are in or near Central America. This vagueness is because her parents were intelligence officers for the U.S. government, and she can’t disclose where she grew up or their real names. It’s about being a young person in a large family where everyone lived with that vagueness (though her parents do explain things to her when they think she’s old enough). Glock lived under a sense of heightened threat, with real security measures, but still as a teen managed to have a secret life partying with friends from school. But her friendships were tenuous. The place where she lived was clearly not home. And she was dealing with her changing relationship with her older sister, who had just left for her first year of college back in the states. Glock saw herself as the awkward one, a person who had trouble getting close to others, which was complicated by language barriers, family relationships, and the fact that she liked girls as well as boys. Her coming-of-age story feels both familiar and unique.