Good book with some humor about her struggles with depression, meant to be educative about depression in general but also a kind of honest memoir abouGood book with some humor about her struggles with depression, meant to be educative about depression in general but also a kind of honest memoir about what the process of her going into a depression is like. The drawings are… accessible, which is to say that they are like doodles, quick sketches anyone might make, like we can relate to her, vs. polished professional artistry…. but they are also good at getting at what she experiences, too. You can see how difficult and annoying she is to be around when she is crazy depressed, so that's interesting… and also, ironically annoying! :) But I think this book would be useful for those experiencing deep depression or those who are friends and family having to deal with those depressed......more
Pretty funny. This is a parody of a self help book (and/or send-up of therapy) with deliberately "outsider" or "undeveloped" art in the manner of JeffPretty funny. This is a parody of a self help book (and/or send-up of therapy) with deliberately "outsider" or "undeveloped" art in the manner of Jeffery Brown (whose work I am crazy about), etc., and it is clear this book is not helpful at all except to make you laugh once in a while. Reminded me of all the unsuccessful therapy I have had: art therapy, etc. Touches on lots of different self help angles such as analysis of dreams, little encouraging quotes (like FB and Goodreads favors, trying-to-be-uplifting stuff), and it is clear it is not going to help at all. In the right mood, and for many people this could be (well, it is for many!) a 5 star book. I liked it and I smiled a few times… maybe I need some more therapy. (Of course I need some more therapy!) Shrigley is an artist, and in the manner of some self help books where the author states she is a PhD or MSW or whatever, he says he has a BA (with Hons)....more
Belgian comics artist Willy Linthout's son Sam committed suicide. Linthout is widely known in Belgium and the Netherlands for his goofy Urbanus cartooBelgian comics artist Willy Linthout's son Sam committed suicide. Linthout is widely known in Belgium and the Netherlands for his goofy Urbanus cartoons, all humorous, fictional stories wrtten and drawn by him, a familiar and famous comedian. Those cartoons are all laughs all the time, apparently; silly. I can't say for sure because these aren't translated into English yet. Then this terrible thing happens to Linthout to disrupt his goofy positive view of the world. You lose someone in your life, that's hard for anyone. Losing my mother, losing my father, these events were the worst things that have happened to me. And the "loss" of my apparently normal son to autism beginning at the age of three. But losing your son to suicide: How can you recover from it? And Linthout was not estranged from his son. He says they were friends, not just a father and son.
So the two books that are translated into English from Linthout pertaining this experience are Elephant, quite raw, focused on his insane experiences with grief; the second, What We Need to Know, broadens the focus to his wider family, to three brothers who all use inappropriate coping mechanisms for their problems, though alcohol seems to be the central crutch for all of them.
I don't know Linthout, so I have to piece together a sort of reflection about how these memoirist comics work with his funny stuff. Linthout likes to make people laugh with his comics, then this suicide hits him like a ton of bricks. He decides to try to evoke for himself and his readers what this experience is like for him, something he never tried to do before. Urbanus feels a little like old-style comics, decades old, madcap, hilarious, with lots of color. They don't seem polished, but they are accomplished and very popular. In Elephant and What We Need Linthout attempts something different; they're black and white, and feel often like a first draft sketchbook (Elephant intro writer Paul Gravett says it is like Jeffrey Brown's Clumsy, and that is exactly right), which may be off-putting if you expect finished, impressive, precise artwork in your comics.
So we know Linthout is capable of more polished artwork; so what's the effect of it all? Intimacy, rawness. Gravett said that Linthout told him, "Sam's life didn't get to go all the way, it stayed unfinished, so the same goes for my pencils." It's all pencil work, you can see the sketching, some erasures, but this turns out to be an effective strategy. He's not making Art, he's telling a simpole, painful story abut his son. Or maybe, rather, that is what Art is for him here, it's not some polished, pretentious process. And still, Linthout, a joke-teller, is who he is. He wants to show you how ridiculous life can be even in grief. Whenever he can he shows you how the main character is almost comically nuts from his grief. Moments feature the darkest of comedy, with painful smiles.
Linthout chooses fiction as his vehicle for telling, but it's thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, based on what little I know. What does he get to do with fiction vs straight memoir? Cris Mazza, a fiction writer, once told me she hated memoir. She thought you could do so much more with fiction, you could do anything with it, though she now also writes memoir and uses it to explore her own issues. But maybe Linthout, a fiction writer, saw, too, that he could convey his experience better through fiction, through metaphor, through analogy. He chooses a character, Roger, whose son Jack commits suicide. Wife Simone also loses their son, too, of course, but interestingly, Roger is not able to go through the process of grieving with her. He speaks to his wife throughout, but she is never actually depicted, she is out of the frame, which effectively conveys his isolation from her in his grief.
Later, Roger seems to recognize that the main person he could have/should have leaned on was his wife, but this isn't where his emotions took him at the time. Grief too often isolates rather than brings us together. Roger does get comforted by a therapist, and his brother Charles (and Linthout's own brother writes a poem that Linthout includes as being written by Roger. . . who then gets depicted not as a comics writer, but as a poet). There's a fascinating scene in a bookstore where a woman upbraids Roger for writing about his son so callously in his "poems" [though in real life, Linthout had released the first part of Elephant. . . ], and castigates him for not "properly" grieving his dead son! For being "disrespectful" even to write about the experience in the way he does! How can he win?!). He tries booze and prescription drugs to cope, but mainly he is just spinning out of control.
Roger's experience of grief is completely interesting to me; it's surreal, or a bit like magical realism. He is "visited" regularly by his son all the time in his imagination. The police outline of his body on the pavement Roger wants to preserve forever. He has fits of anger, filled with hallucination, all of which are depicted as the same as any other experiences (as Chris Ware accomplishes in Jimmy Corrigan, where memory and fantasy and perception blend, we don't always know which is which, just as Roger struggles with these distinctions). Roger is insane with grief, and the fiction helps us to see this in a way that straight memoir may not for Linthout. I also just read John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite, about Porcellino's painful lifelong physical and psychological struggles, a memoir, and Linthout's tale is equally painful and unsparing.
In the end, Roger turns silently into Willy, in the final panels, and I won't say more about it than that, but that shift from Roger to Willy is surprising and touching and wonderful, in a way, I'll just say that.
I don't know much of pain or grief or loss, really, still at 61, though I will, for sure, know more. It's part of life, of course. Some people didn't "enjoy" this book and rated it low. Part of this has to do with the artwork, which seems perhaps to them like some old guy's sketchbook, not professional. Maybe in a way it is repetitive, as the grief and craziness just goes on and on for years. Maybe part of it is that people don't want to know hard things, they make them uncomfortable, sad. But I think these stories provide us maps for how to navigate such experiences, and how not to, or just help us see what is humanly possible, even if they are not a complete release from pain. I didn't "love" this book, but at the same time it has stayed with me, powerful in its raw depiction of grief. I was thankful for it.
I first read it in December 2014 and again for a class in February 2015, where we took a look at his goofier stuff with/about Urbanus (the Belgian comedian), which so contrasts with the work on grief. But he's an accomplished artist that knows what he is doing in these sketchy comics. It seems to me that he gives us one gift in Urbanus when he makes us laugh at life, and another in helping us see how to cope (and sometimes not to cope) with trauma. And even sometimes laugh at yourself in grief.
I initially gave it four stars because I still felt a little distant from Linthout and his experience in my reading it, but I now feel it is awesome, profoundly affecting, it stays and stays with me....more
This is by far the best work I have seen from Ellen Forney (though as a huge fan of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, This is by far the best work I have seen from Ellen Forney (though as a huge fan of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I appreciate her drawings in that, but this is really just an aside since it is not primarily her work!). Marbles is a detailed story about her life with bi-polar disorder, with plenty of focus on her relationship with her psychiatrist and meds... maybe too much, I 'd say in the last 1/3, when I got a little restless and bored with the level of detail in the same way I had with the somewhat obsessively detailed self-analysis in Are You My Mother? But this is a valuable story for anyone going through this frightening disorder, obviously, a valuable record of the roller coaster ride through hell it is... Her most ambitious work, best drawn, that I have seen. She also looks into the relationship between madness and creativity, which is very interesting, given how many crazy artists and writers there have been and are. She wonders if you can medicate your creativity away... I wrote a short story about this, "LIllie Dancing," which is also about this, and my very real questions about this after working with a girl with bipolar I met when I was working in a psych hospital. My 13 year old son has some as yet undiagnosed psych issues that led me to read this, and I was grateful for information and her lively perspective on all this, and in the process became a fan of Ellen Forney again......more
I prefer it when Dr Sacks focuses more closely on one or three people and tells their stories in depth, but this is a fine and entertaining collectionI prefer it when Dr Sacks focuses more closely on one or three people and tells their stories in depth, but this is a fine and entertaining collection of anecdotes in a kind of catalogue of non-schizophrenic hallucinogenic experiences, including his own sometimes drug-induced experiences in the sixties.
The feeling you get as you read this book is that the brain is not a very precise instrument for perception, and that auditory, visual and other sensory hallucinations are less commonly to be associated with the "insane" than those who do not have psychiatric diagnoses. How can you get them? If you go blind or deaf, 20-30 % chance you will have them; grief; drugs (many artists did and do take drugs to find creative inspiration); head trauma and other accidents, sensory deprivation (some surrealists deliberately deprived themselves of food, water, sleep so they would hallucinate..), epilepsy (once considered a 'sacred" disease), migraines, fever, on the edge of sleep or waking. . .
Seeing ghosts or people you have loved intensely after they have died he sees as common, but he sees these things as hallucinations and not psychic phenomena (though the line seems pretty thin there). I have a son and sister and other family members who claim (and I believe have) psychic "powers," and another son (now 13) who has had some psychotic episodes, and I am interested in the relationship between insight, vision, and madness. This book touches on these issues for me, and I'll keep reading, but this was, as always for me with Dr. Sacks, an enlightening and entertaining collection of stories that opened up my perspective on the bizarre and unpredictable and amazing human brain. ...more
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter tiRevision of review 4/9/17
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter time. He also ran a punk record label and performed in several bands, and oh, yeah, produces these amazing, detailed graphic novels and stories, including the series that took him and his co-authors to The National Book Award in 2016, March, the graphic memoir from Sen. John Lewis of the Civil Rights movement in the US, which Powell illustrated. But Swallow was my very first encounter with him, a story about a family dealing with a dying grandmother who is losing it, and a brother and sister dealing with early onset schizophrenia, something that statistics tell me is something much more common than I had imagined.
The focus in Whole is on the two kids, with primary focus on the girl's more serious, less able to hide, experiences, her visual hallucinations and obsessions. I read this initially and again as a parent whose son has been hospitalized for related issues, so it was scary for me, in the sense that it felt a little more real to me than just any graphic story, of course. In my late teens and twenties, too, I worked in a psych ward with some teens who were schizophrenic, hallucinating, paranoid, what they then called manic-depressive, so I have had some powerful experiences with this stuff. Powell wants us to try to experience what it may feel like to live in two worlds, the "real" world and this hallucinatory one that is unfortunately just as real, and with some folks, this secondary world takes over your “other” life. Sad, and frightening, though Powell also captures the anguish (and some attractions/fascinations associated with it) beautifully, I think. Reminds me a bit of David B's attempt to depict what he imagines his brother's epilepsy to be, which is of course another sad and anguished story, and also Craig Thompson's Blankets, where he tries to mostly visually capture the swirling, romantic falling of first love. What I’m pointing to here is the way comics can attempt to “capture” the emotional aspects of experience, through metaphor.
I've now taught/read this book several times. I had the occasion to meet Powell, who said this was his favorite, his most personal book. Some students don't like it for the very reason I do like it: his almost indecipherable hand lettering, which I think helps you understand auditory hallucinations in a way as happening sometimes just on the edge of “normal” hearing, and also helps you recall the mumbling of quiet, alienated young people, their sometimes disjointed, fanatical and unexplained experiences, which are told here to help us understand the experience of hallucinations.
Some of the images are very scary, the stuff of horror, which is what schizophrenics may regularly wrestle with. It's not fun to read, but there's a kind tenderness to the relationship between the brother and sister, who both suffer from the disorder in different ways. The fear, and the coming to terms (in part) with themselves as humans possessing these unwanted perceptions, that's heart wrenching. Powerful, I thought. Not for everyone, maybe. But as I said, I connect with it in part for family and work reasons. As a teacher, you know you have kids in your classrooms that hear voices and have hallucinations, and are medicated, but you don't always know this.
The medication can help a lot, by the way, and very much has helped my son, I write years later.. It's a muh better world for schizophrenics than in the seventies when I worked in the hospital,or even when Powell worked with folks decades later. Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations makes it clear that what we think of as misperception (think: mirages, and so on) is much more common than most people think.
This last reading, completed April 9, 2017, feels like the grimmest time I have read this book, because in part the future seems scary for my now-17-year old son (and now repost it in July 2024). It's like looking deeply into the heart of darkness, into madness itself. It’s terrifying, really, though. I sometimes ride the trains to work here in Chicago with plenty of homeless people, some of whom I see are having psychotic episodes, who used to be better protected in and by institutions. The world seems like a meaner, less supportive place to me for people that Powell writes about, for people like my son, than when I worked in the psych hospital in the seventies....more
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