Traumatic Layerings of Self: Scrapbooking Personal Photographs in One Hundred Demons

Abstract

A close reading of scrapbooked personal photographs in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, a graphic memoir that relates the impact of everyday trauma on self, shows how this narrative technique resists, critiques, and works towards re-defining popularly accepted terms of self-representation and identity. By adding layers of meaning to existing portrayals of self, scrapbooking personal photographs not only addresses but troubles the split between outer and inner expressions of self so powerfully felt by those who suffer everyday trauma. It also accentuates the instability, unknowingness, and incompleteness of a traumatized identity, thus presenting a more authentic, because less coherent and definite understanding of self.