Raina, a shy and anxious girl, finds this troubling. Leading the jeers is Michelle, who delights in tormenting other students. After throwing up on the playground and dropping his pencil in it, one boy experiences taunting from his classmates. Raina reports that stomach flu is prevalent during the last months of her fourth-grade year. She notes that the fear of vomiting is quite distressing. Later that night, she becomes nauseated a second time without throwing up. Her mom accompanies her to the bathroom, where she vomits.

She rouses her mother, who tells her that a stomach bug is active in the family. Nine-year-old Raina wakes up nauseated in the middle of the night. Summarized here is the 2019 paperback version of the book published by Graphix. In September 2019, Guts rose to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for all books. In 2020, Guts received two Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, graphic literature’s highest honors-one for Best Writer/Artist and one for Best Publication for Kids. The cartoon strips she draws to mitigate her distress become a major part of her adult life, along with anxiety and IBS. Her narrative chronicles how she tries to cope with these illnesses as a preadolescent while simultaneously encountering bullying and injustice at school and benign chaos in the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her parents, sister, brother, and occasionally her grandmother.

Panic attacks accompany the IBS, and the two conditions exacerbate each other, intensifying her distress. During this period, she first experiences gastrointestinal issues, eventually diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Guts specifically records Raina’s fourth- and fifth-grade years, when she transitioned from nine to 10 years old. Guts is the third mid-grade graphic memoir in a trilogy by author/illustrator Raina Telgemeier through which she relates the true story of her childhood.

Guts by raina telgemeier