Leavitt recounts how she is still able to play with her mom and laugh at her mother’s sometimes poetic confusion. Tangles reveals the tender moments of sweetness and happiness as well as the moments of despair, confusion and darkness. It shows that there is no manual or straight forward path for care giving as Leavitt is asked to reconsider her roles, expectations, and relationships. The book questions what it means to take care of someone and act compassionately. Her personal history and personality are maintained by other people and places. She shows how Midge’s personal history and personality are not solely her possession. As she account her mother’s survival, Leavitt is able to bring the reader’s focus to the unexpected places in which her Mother’s traces can be found. Through black and white drawings and candid prose, Leavitt’s story unfolds episodically by weaving together a series of snapshots, and anecdotes that documents Sarah’s struggle for continuity and dealing with change. Leavitt experience and her mother’s life brings together multiple, cities, histories, and lives. Finally, Sarah is trying to balancing her responsibilities as a caregiver and her needs as a daughter. She is trying to maintain her mother’s remaining traces while learning to let go of the abstract idea of her mother and take care of her mother as she is. Leavitt herself is working through trying to take care of her mother as a person rather than a list of needs. Leavitt’s mother Midge struggles between her former independent, creative, and intellectual life with her current life of accepting care and retreat from her social and creative life. The comic explores the pregnant pauses, the confusion, reactions, and the constantly shifting feelings of Alzheimer’s disease as characters try to balance their shifting and contradictory roles. She guides the reader through the emotionally charged bed rails, pills, neighborhoods, and absences of care giving. Through her minimalist drawings, the reader is able to explore the objects and spaces that make up the world as well as the distorted realities of care giving. Leavitt’s drawings allow the reader to explore the day to day experience of Alzheimer’s and give insight into the performance of the disease. The graphic memoir recounts that the story of Alzheimer’s is not the story of the disease rather, the story of Alzheimer’s is the story of everything else. The book explores the confusing, sweet, and messy relationships that arise from Alzheimer’s disease.

The graphic memoir is based on the sketches and notes that Leavitt made in an attempt to “hold on” to all the traces of her mom, a former kindergarten teacher in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me recounts her the six years following her mother Midge’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease.

Tangles by Sarah Leavitt