The press illustrator and Charlie Hebdo survivor Coco looks back at the events of January 7, 2015, and her long path to recovery. A graphic account, in every sense of the word, of a humble, unflinching personal journey. The drawings lay bare her inner soul.

«Alone with the psychotherapist, I try to put the unsayable into words. The terrorist attack of January 7, 2015, plays in a loop in my head.

The hostages. The firing. The silence. The pictures.

How can you explain sheer terror? Why do I feel so guilty?

Who can understand the extreme solitude I felt that day?

I explore a thick fog of sensations, emotions, and doubts.

Some memories are blurred by the traumatic shock. I run into fragments of memory, broken, incomplete. Everything is scattered. I try to piece together what happened next. Return to the world of the living. Find the strength to keep going, to overcome the trauma. Keep the magazine going, despite the chaos and the grieving. Keep drawing.

I’m not dead. I’m not hurt. Yet something in me is broken. I live with it. With the 7th, an impossible burden, as crushing as my feeling of powerlessness faced with two jihadis armed to the teeth.

I keep drawing to drive the 7th out of my mind. Everything inside me is fucked up, only drawing resists. So I keep drawing, and drawing, and drawing.»