We share this family’s joys and pain because we relate to them as a family, not as representatives of a specific suffering. This background material alternates with the ongoing narrative of illness and makes the family’s successive stages of adjustment and final bereavement all the more wrenching. Folded into the broader narrative is the author’s own coming-of-age story: premonitory childhood nightmares, sibling rivalry, recognition and acceptance of her lesbianism and the subsequent coming out, making a life for herself in Vancouver beyond the parochial confines of New Brunswick. The Leavitt parents are secular Jews who raise their two daughters to revere books and learning. Even without the Alzheimer’s angle, the book would be a first-rate portrait of middle-class family life. The graphic memoir’s lean drawings and honest language combine to paint a loving portrait of a family as Midge moves through the stages of the disease. It all might be unbearably grim had Leavitt not provided such a rich context for her mother’s suffering. Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles uses images and words to illustrate her mother Midge’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease dementia and her family’s reaction to this new reality. “One day,’’ Sarah writes, “I was so sad about everything that it was all I could do to make it home from our walk without crying in the middle of the street.’’ The Leavitts continually improvise new roles for themselves as the Midge they knew gradually slips from their grasp. Article contentĪnd it doesn’t get any prettier from there. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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