Sarah Braybrooke and Marika Webb-Pullman at Scribe have acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene by Tallulah Pomeroy. Described as an ‘unconventional illustrated gift book’, it is a collection of true stories of women’s bodies by the UK artist Tallulah Pomeroy. She describes her book as ‘an uncovering of feminine bodily secrets — glorious for the nosy, horrifying for the prudes.’
The book sprang out of a Facebook group Pomeroy created asking women to submit stories about their ‘unladylike’ behaviour. The page was soon flooded with more stories than she could have ever imagined: about ear wax and trapped wind, grey pubes and bloody pyjamas. It became a community of honest, funny, and supportive women, who, by admitting to things they'd thought were shameful, no longer had to feel ashamed — or alone.
Braybrooke and Webb-Pullman said: ‘Tallulah’s book is gleeful, gross, subversive, and beautiful all at once. It takes female bodies as far away from the male gaze as it is possible to get, and in doing so it rewrites the definition of femininity. We can’t wait to share this with all our favourite women.’
Since studying illustration at Falmouth University, Pomeroy has lived and worked in Brooklyn, Morocco, and Spain. She is the in-house illustrator for online magazine Catapult.co and currently lives in Bristol.
Rights were acquired from Rachel Clements at Abner Stein, acting on behalf of Judy Klein at Kleinworks and Soft Skull Press, who publish the US edition. The UK and ANZ editions will be published in November, 2018.