Book Noted

“If there are really so many of us, I wonder why we never talk about it. And why I’m still a bit ashamed.”

PARENTHESIS by Elodie Durand is a graphic memoir translated from French that narrates the author’s experience with tumor-related epilepsy. It is actually my introduction to the field of graphic medicine, a unique form of sharing stories about chronic illness and disability that I find incredibly engaging, if not personally the most accessible. I thought this memoir was so effective in capturing the confusion, anger, embarrassment, and grief the author felt experiencing disability, memory loss, and chronic illness as a young adult, and I especially loved that she interspersed it with images that she had drawn during these periods.

It reminded me a bit of Tara Sidhoo Fraser’s WHEN MY GHOST SINGS in that sometimes we need to create a new form of writing to share our experience. Both memoirs create their own forms to share the experience of memory loss, in Fraser’s case a new character called “Ghost,” and in Durand’s case, visuals that she created during her illness and the at times dramatically different art styles throughout the memoir.

There were a few quotes and panels that particularly stood out to me, and I’ve included them above.