Alzheimer's Disease and the Ethics of Care in the Graphic Memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me

Abstract

Alzheimer's Disease and the Ethics of Care in the Graphic Memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me Hsin-Ju Kuo (bio) 1. Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me1 Sarah Leavitt published her graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me in 2012. Since its publication, Tangles has been widely appreciated by the public and Alzheimer associations in various countries due to the sensitivity and honesty of its depiction. In the memoir, the author poignantly portrays the pain she goes through as a daughter and caregiver for her formerly spirited mother who is altered and deformed by dreadfulness and fragility as her Alzheimer's disease progresses. Leavitt's graphic memoir observes and "unsettles some traditions of the autobiographical genre by contesting an implied ownership of the truth in her narrative" (Dalmaso 75). An introductory paragraph from the memoir delineates the mother's attachment to her family: My mother loved her family with a fierce and absolute love. Alzheimer's tore her away from us and from herself in a cruel, relentless progression of losses. But as she lost her ability to form sentences, and stopped saying our names, and stopped understanding ideas like sister, daughter or husband, she would still cry out with joy when we came into the room. (Tangles 7) Leavitt candidly acknowledges her particularly poor memory. Leavitt begins the introduction by frankly admitting the weakness of her own memory, since the entire narrative is built around memory problems. Leavitt writes about her patchwork process of assisting her memory using notes and sketches: "I've always had a really bad memory. So when my mother got Alzheimer's disease, I knew that I had to record what was happening to her and to our family" (Tangles 7). The author reminds the readers that other family members may reminisce about things in a different way. Thus, Leavitt violates a major tradition of the autobiographical [End Page 101] genre by casting doubt upon her own trustworthiness as an author from the very beginning. The author alludes to her own memory issues at the outset, showing readers that the story is both about herself and her mother. Concurrently, her initial remarks also call into question the credibility of the memory in her own autobiographical narrative, an issue she reemphasizes in the last paragraph of the introduction: "This is the story that I have pieced together from my memories, my notes, and my sketches. Other people in my family may remember things differently. In the end, this is only my story: the tangled story of my mother, and me, and Alzheimer's" (Tangles 7). In this way, Leavitt's representation sets itself apart from the traditions of the autobiographical genre that tend to emphasize authenticity. Tangles uses visual metaphors to depict the progression of her mother's arduous struggle with Alzheimer's disease, showing her as someone slowly floating away from her previous self. As the whole family gradually loses its matriarch, the members become increasingly entangled in a bewildering transformation of their interpersonal relationships as the mother's identity loss progresses. This study explores the work from three dimensions. First, it investigates the ways graphic memoirs have developed and evolved to influence the genre of life narratives, as well as how they have contributed to creating a complete picture of aspects related to medical humanities. Then, focusing on the example presented in Tangles, it analyzes how the experience of confronting Alzheimer's disease has enormously transformed the protagonist's family. Finally, it will explore notions of the ethics of being for others, as well as the ethics of caring for others. This study will show how Leavitt's graphic memoir questions what it means to genuinely take care of others by confronting the complexity of Alzheimer's, and reaffirms the bonds of self-other relationships, within which the caregiver's identity must ultimately be reshaped. 2. Graphic Medicine, Graphic Memoir, and Autobiographical Comics The expression "graphic medicine" was created by medical doctor and cartoonist Ian Williams, who founded the eponymous website graphic-medicine.org to describe...