Tangles A story about Alzheimer's, my mother, and me

Sarah Leavitt

Book - 2012

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2nd Floor 616.83110092/Leavitt Due Apr 5, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Graphic novels
Personal narratives
Autobiographical comics
Published
New York : Skyhorse c2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Sarah Leavitt (-)
Item Description
What do you do when your outspoken, passionate and quick-witted mother starts fading into a forgetful, fearful woman? In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer's disease transformed her mother Midge - and her family forever. In spare black-and-white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family's journey through a harrowing range of emotions - shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration - all the while learning to cope, and managing to find moments of happiness. Midge, a Harvard-educated intellectual, struggles to comprehend the simplest words; Sarah's father Rob slowly adapts to his new role as full-time caretaker, but still finds time for word-play and poetry with his wife; Sarah and her sister Hannah argue, laugh and grieve together as they join forces to help Midge get to sleep, rage about family friends who have disappeared, or collapse in tears at the end of a heartbreaking day. Tangles confronts the complexity of Alzheimer's disease, and ultimately opens a knot of moments, memories and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.
Physical Description
127 p. : ill. ; 27 cm
ISBN
9781616086398
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Leavitt's memoir of her mother Midge's decline into Alzheimer's, beginning at the early age of 52, follows the family as they strive to keep Midge in a loving home, protected from as much alienation caused by the disease as they are able to. Leavitt received permission from her mother in the early stages of illness to make a lasting record of Midge's and her family's struggles between the onset of forgetfulness and her death at age 60. What emerges is a beautiful portrait of a family and its changing relationships. Leavitt's simple cartoon style emphasizes facial expressions and body postures, which are as important to telling the story as her well-chosen words. Her mother's love of nature, her father's ability to continue to read poetry to a wife who no longer knew him, her sister's new baby, and her own partner's support are vividly evoked. Like Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar's Our Cancer Year (1994), this serves as an excellent and accessible exploration of how a disease affects real people, both the patient and the caregivers.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

The neurofibrillary tangles within the brain cells of Alzheimer's patients refers also, in this title, to the tangled "boings" of hair characteristic of the women in Leavitt's close-knit, intellectual family. Her Harvard-educated teacher mother, Midge, began to show signs of the disease at age 52, and it progressed over the next six years through unpredictable stages of knowing to unknowing, recognition to cluelessness, beguiling affection to hostility to vapid cheer to no-being. Meanwhile, Leavitt cries, writes, and draws, finally crafting the whole into this debut composed of vignettes of family history and Midge's decline. In dialog, she captures the oddly alluring poetry spilling from Midge's compromised persona: "Oh broccoli, who are simple." VERDICT- Says Leavitt, "Our parents taught us, as very young children, that language, words, and books belonged to us, that they were exciting and powerful." Pairing words with simply drawn, evocative line art, Leavitt has crafted a glowing, heart-wrenching memorial to the woman who gave her such a gift. Useful for anyone with an Alzheimer's patient among family or friends, for health-care professionals, and for graphic arts programs as an example of how simple art can tell a powerful story. So far, the only published Alzheimer's-related graphic novel-and highly recommended.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The power of this graphic memoir is not that its story about a family dealing with Alzheimer's is so extraordinary, but that it has become so ordinary. In her first book, Canadian writer and cartoonist Leavitt shows her mother agreeing to have her experiences with the disease documented because "[m]aybe this will help other families!" And likely it will, letting those experiencing the dementia of someone they love know what to expect, and to reassure that the tangled emotions they feel in response--anger, frustration, devotion, humor--are inevitable. Though this is primarily an account of the author's experiences as her mother becomes all but emotionally unrecognizable, it is also a narrative spanning two three generations of complicated family dynamics. Leavitt illustrates significant differences between her mother's closeness with her sisters and how the disease affects those relationships, and the contrasting tension between the author and her sister. It shows the strains that Alzheimer's puts on everything--from the sufferer's well being and sense of purpose to a loving marriage to the physical demands of caring for someone who can no longer care for herself. The narrative is human, honest, loving and occasionally even funny. "I created this book," Leavitt writes in the introduction, "to remember her as she was before she got sick, but also to remember her as she was during her illness, the ways in which she was transformed and the ways in which parts of her endured. As my mother changed, I changed too, forced to reconsider my own identity as a daughter and as an adult and to recreate my relationship with my mother." Not simply the story of a disease, but of the flawed, complex, intelligent people whose lives it transformed.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.