Cut My Life Into Pieces: Alzheimer’s, Identity, and the Closure of Selfhood in Sarah Leavitt’s "Tangles: A Story of Alzheimer's, My Mother, And Me"
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and their effects on the sufferer’s recollection of the world around them fundamentally reframes typical conceptions of identity and memory, and literary representation serves as a way to understand how the intersection of mind, body, and environment shapes selfhood. Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, Tangles: A story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me uses the unique narrative techniques of the graphic medium to interrogate a longstanding conception of human identity – that selfhood is wholly the result of a functioning mind, and that an impaired mental archive deletes one’s identity. Instead, the text uses the story of Leavitt’s mother, Midge, to assert that identity is relational – it is formed when the mind and body suture together mental, physical, and environmental information into a cohesive worldview. In the same way that comic book closure finds its meaning in the blank spaces between panels, identity is formed from a gestalt of information that the process of emplotment helps compose.
Source: Università degli Studi di Genova
Author: Jacobi, Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6961606003
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