Reciprocal realities: Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s and the Wonderland approach to dementia

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass, a recent instalment of the Graphic Medicine book series. The significance of Walrath’s work for questions regarding dementia and sociality is assessed. Walrath’s attitude towards her mother Alice’s dementia is read against Arthur Frank’s theory of illness narratives. In the second edition of his text The Wounded Storyteller ([1995] 2013), Frank introduces the category of ‘broken narratives’ into his analytical taxonomy. Frank understands a broken narrative perspective to be a subject position characterized by a condition that inhibits the subject’s ability to narrate their illness experience. The ability of Frank’s framework to engage with the dementia subject’s broken narrative position in a remedial capacity is criticized, and Walrath’s narrative theory (termed ‘the Wonderland approach’) is championed as an alternative, superior approach to the broken narrative situation of dementia. The article goes on to engage critically with Walrath’s previously un-theorized artwork. The formal composition of Walrath’s graphic vignettes is shown to be emblematic of the theory undergirding her book. Walrath’s art accommodates readings by ill people and well people alike, at once illustrating and demonstrating the patient/carer relationship she champions. This analysis supports the core claims of the Graphic Medicine movement and suggests that comics can be effectively deployed in the effort to tackle the problematic of dementia and sociality.