in reading this graphic memoir, i've been thinking a lot about how family and complex personal history influences/shapes individual identities. and what that drive is, or what the necessity is, in writing and making art that works out these connections and histories. i realized that my defenses went up when laurie's sister asked her why she insisted on digging deeper into the background of their father, and further, why she insisted on publishing an expose about it, as opposed to just getting a therapist, working out the damage and confusion on her own. it seems like a natural impulse for one to use art as a means for understanding (not only this, but actually FINDING OUT) persistent and often underlying family dramas. it seems that the point when we recognize our own families and personalities as fallible, suspect, and NOT normal/average jumpstarts this process of recounting and reassessing what we believed were personal and/or family truths.
i'm interested in the connection between the chosen form (not just memoir, but GRAPHIC memoir) and the way memory is working in this. the way the text is divided into shorts and the mixes both the visual and written create a memory patchwork. she uses various strategies to weave together memories and stories she's recalled, interviews with her father and others that she's recorded, old drawings, etc. this patchwork feels particularly fitting because memory recollection (especially when dealing with ones from childhood ) works that way-- everything comes at us at once, we don't recall things in a linear, chronological fashion, and scenes come to us in clumps, with life in real time interrupting our process of piecing together our pasts. this graphic memoir with its collection of shorts pictorially represents the way we tend to replay memories, scene by scene. it seems like the choice to include the visual is a grounding mechanism. it's hard enough to keep track of all we've remembered, heard, directly experienced, etc. illustrating and writing out these events and mythologies makes it feel real, tangible, not just fabricated. sandell had a hard enough time throughout her life trying to grasp what stories were actually true that it probably seemed necessary to chronicle every possible version-- from beloved tall tale to a private investigator's harsh truth.
back to identity formation and family history. this whole text made me wonder how we wind up coming out alive after experiencing such conflicted childhoods/adolescences/adulthoods, and what we should do once we have survived. what do we do with our own complicated stories and family experiences when we need outlets to process them, but know the public act of doing so may hurt/embarrass/create complications/etc for the people we love? how do we deal with relationships that are constantly in crisis? does writing/speaking them actually heal?
Rex, the question you ask is one of the central ones--why the graphic? This is a rich story, I try to imagine it as a text memoir and think that the obsession would be a different picture so to speak. We're going to go into theme a little, and strategy a lot.
ReplyDeletee
My eye caught on the word "fabricated", as it fits with your choice of the term "patchwork" to describe Sandells multivarieate graphic style and memoir. Fabrication suggests something from nothing, but in the case of a quilt it is to make something that is more than a sum of its parts. And bits and pieces aren't nothing, but perhaps they are tatters. The graphic memoir was a way for Sandell to piece together the world as she knew it from some wreckage her father had left, a shattered sense of truth. kristin
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Kristin, well said. As a novel, the exploration, the questions, would have been tedious. This fluctuating mosaic of many-sized frames gave this string of personal anecdotes a serious thrust. So many mismatched beads become a necklace.
DeleteI enjoy how you made the connection between our own memory and recollections of events in our lives to the medium and "shorts" within the memoir. It is so true! We almost always have memories recalled in chunks and generally a smell, an object a visual cue that can induce a kind of memory within in... PTSD much? Anyway that was a truly clever connection you made. Also, I too wonder why she chose a GRAPHIC novel... why? I mean I know she thought about her parents and her siblings or close friends open to multiple pages of say, seeing her naked, or her fathers over dramatic, blood shot, bulging, manic eyes! I wonder if this format was a way to a make it GRAPHIC and perhaps more shocking or seductive. Not sure. I'd be interested to hear what everyone has to say tomorrow night.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your inquisition toward the ways that we form identity, history and memory, and how we can grapple with those things. I think Sandell's choice of the graphic novel definitely catered to the type of story that she wanted to tell, and how she wanted her readers to interpret the things that happened. Perhaps her memory is visual-kinetic, and a drawn experience paired with a written experience seemed like the true way to relate. I like your insistence or impulse to use art in absolutely any fashion to reconcile with our emotions, and I too wonder if writing or speaking our turmoils can heal them. Is it the actual act of doing these things, or is it the fact that by speaking or writing them, we're affirming that they hold truths to ourselves and therefore are important and valid? Awesome and introspective things to think about, especially if applied to Sandell's G.N!
ReplyDeleteLucille
I like your recognition of the patchwork of memory. Looking back, it very much is such. Sandell has chosen the most concise memories to support her ideas about her upbringing. That is one thing I quite enjoy about graphic novels, they are often concise. Which I find very refreshing! And the sort of fragmented way in which she presents the stories, in short versions, allow the reader to get the most out of each memory.
ReplyDeleteI agree when thinking about one's life, it is a collection of patchwork pieces that, in the telling of our stories, comes together at different times to form different sorts of patchwork quilts. What we tell and reveal today could look one way, and in several years, telling the same stories with revealing more or less will produce a different sort of tapestry of story.
DeleteYour post helped me to see a reason for the graphic memoir. as you say about our memory, "everything comes at us at once, we don't recall things in a linear, chronological fashion, and scenes come to us in clumps, with life in real time interrupting our process of piecing together our pasts." Therefore, to write our memories in the traditional linear form of words > sentences > paragraphs > pages > chapters > book, may not be the best strategy. You have made the case for the graphic memoir being a more holistic approach to recording the memories we seek to capture in print. I have learned so much from reading the blog posts. Thanks, Darin
ReplyDeletedammit darin, you stole my quote! hahahaha just kidding. but that really just opened up a new way to vision this book, and loosen up on her for being a living contradiction (albeit a damn good one!) some memories do stand out more than others, ie, taking up a larger frame/shape in our brains, and this here is laurie's visual interpretation of her own. she still manages to tell the story in such a stoic, nonchalant yet grippingly excited manner that it straps you into her memories two-fold. i wonder, if there wasn't a GRAPHIC novel, how much we would grasp of the story if it were told at the same pace?
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