In June 2014, the journalist Patrick Hilsman and I crossed the border into Syria. Young fighters from the Islamic Front escorted us around the Bab al Salam camp for internally displaced persons, and later led us through Azaz, a ruined border town. The Syrian regime’s bombings had wiped out entire city blocks. Though the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, had just been kicked out, the group’s torn black flag still fluttered on one flagpole. ISIS had been murdering Syrians for the last year; two months later, they would behead the American journalist James Foley. Later I corresponded with a Syrian living under ISIS’s cosplay “caliphate.” He sent me photos of daily life to draw from, then wrote essays to accompany them. Ours is the collaboration of which I’m most proud.
I liked writing about men—construction workers, prisoners, and soldiers—but one of my deepest investigative pieces for Vice focused on sex workers in the Bronx. I met Love, a former street-based sex worker, after weeks of attending early mornings in prostitution courts where a self-righteous judge claimed to rescue women. Love told me how New York cops raped sex workers, entrapped them, and used them for easy arrests. The cops had falsely arrested Love, but she fought her conviction. She was acquitted.
As I worked abroad, I began to recognize my own smallness in the vast world, and the learning I still had to do. I relied on locals, whether activists, journalists, artists, or generous strangers, and got to know freelance war correspondents over late-night whiskey in Gaziantep or Beirut. I drew and listened as intently as I could. The gap between reality and representation still haunted me, but the work meant more to me than anything I’d ever done. The more difficult the place I traveled to, the more I could put my own mind on hold. I loved seeing geopolitics up close, the human maneuvers that lay behind the pious lies of those in charge.
One morning, I sat in a café in a crumbling desert town with Sean O’Driscoll, one of the finest journalists I’d ever met. I was investigating migrant workers building Abu Dhabi’s great museums, and Sean had spent the previous day sneaking me onto museum construction sites. He introduced me to his young translator. Like many South Asians in the Gulf, the young man was working in construction, but he was unusual: a born hustler, rebellious, sarcastic, and achingly smart. If the world were just, he would have been writing my article instead of me. But I was born in New York, and he in rural Pakistan. Globalism has less leeway for a poor country’s brilliant sons.
As the translator gossiped about his abusive boss, I drew him with a Pilot pen—filling in his arched lips, his messy James Dean hair—then tore out the drawing and gave it to him.
The week passed. With the help of Sean and the translator, I finished the research for my article. On the plane to back New York I took out my sketchbook, found the page where I’d torn out the translator’s portrait, and decorated the ragged edge left behind.
I started drawing as a way to cope with people: to observe and record them, to understand them, charm them, or to keep them at arm’s length. I drew to show Moroccan street kids that I was more than a tourist. I drew to win the attention of beautiful women and to mock authoritarian twits. I drew from the wings of burlesque shows, when the girls peeled off their gloves and poured glitter into the crowd. When the world changed in 2011, I let my art change with it, expanding from nightclub walls to hotel suites and street protests. My drawings bled into the world.
I continue to draw, out of a gluttonous desire for life in all its beauty and horror. I draw everything I hate and everything I love. I fill new notebooks every week, sketching refugee camps and rebels, performers and migrants.
My work has taken me past the edge of burnout. It’s burned in.
Art gave me a way to see, to record, to fight and interrogate, to preserve love and demand reckoning—to find joy where once I could see only ash.
I’d take on the world, armed only with a sketchbook.
I’d make it mine.
in Vanity Fair (vanityfair.com)
This book would never have existed without the faith, wit, and rigor of my editor, Cal Morgan. You are a prince among men. Nor could it have happened without my agent, Lydia Wills, who scooped me up before I knew what I wanted to do with my art, and has been my professional other half ever since. Chelsea G. Summers, a brilliant writer in her own right, spent countless hours helping me chisel the manuscript into shape, and designer Leah Carlson-Stanisic at HarperCollins has made each illustration sit like a queen on the page. Photographer Clayton Cubitt and stylist Katie Wedlund gave me the book cover portrait I most dreamed of, and Melissa Dowell, my right-hand woman, kept life running even as writing Drawing Blood ate my world.
Insomuch as it is art, every memoir is both a lie and a betrayal of other people’s memories. I apologize for all I’ve gotten wrong.
Over the two years it took me to write this book, so many people advised, supported, edited, and guided me, or just made me drunk with their intellect and beauty. Thank you so much to Stoya, Natasha Lennard, Katelan Foisy, Abdulkader al-Hariri, Warren Ellis, Susie Cagle, Melissa Gira Grant, Anna Lekas Miller, Audacia Ray, Lauren Cerand, Danny Gold, Morgan Marquis Boire, Quinn Norton, Eleanor Saitta, Robin Jacks, Joanne McNeil, Kim Boekbinder, Dante Posh, Amber Ray, Jo Weldon, Yener Ozturk, Deniz Ok, Fuck Theory, Zeynep Tufekci, Kate Black, Richard Kimmel, Sean O’Driscoll, Cori Crider, Kabir Khan, Laurie Penny, Buck Angel, Sarah Jaffe, John Knefel, Franz Aliquo, Sara Yasin, Akynos, Ganzeer, Patrick Hilsman, Yiannis Baboulias, Paul Mason, Travis Louie, José Martín, Kio Stark, Bre Pettis, Nicholas Schmidt, Amanda Whip, Anna Therese Day, Flambeux, Emma Beals, Najva Sol, Yumna al Arashi, Sultan Al Qassemi, Rick Foley, Amber Baldet, Magda Sawon, Neil Gaiman, Laurenn McCubbin, Alex Pilosov, Anna Holmes, Matt Taibbi, Mariame Kaba, Jim Batt, Cynthia von Buhler, and Yao Xiao. Thank you too to my patient editors, especially those at Vice. I’ve blown too many deadlines to count.
To George Whitman: I never got to tell you the gift you gave me, when on one careless spring day you invited me to live in your bookstore, and so opened my eyes to life’s possibilities. Rest in power, old man.
To John Leavitt and Jen Dziura, oldest and dearest friends: We became what we became together.
To my mother and mi padre, who each inspired me in their wildly different ways, who loved me at my worst, and who stood by me every step.
To Fred: However awful I was while making this book, there you were, gold and smiling, keeping me from burning it all. Thank you, my love. Always.
About the Author
MOLLY CRABAPPLE is an artist and writer living in New York City. She is a contributing editor for Vice, and she has written for publications including the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
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Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell
Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 2: Devil in the Details
ILLUSTRATED BY MOLLY CRABAPPLE
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
by Matt Taibbi
Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens
by Laurie Penny
Endpapers
Credits
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover illustration by Molly Crabapple
Cover photograph © Clayton Cubitt
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability, or as told to the author by people who were present. Some names, identifying characteristics, and circumstances have been changed to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals involved.
DRAWING BLOOD. Text and illustrations copyright © 2015 by Molly Crabapple. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-scre
en. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-232364-4
EPub Edition December 2015 ISBN 9780062323651
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