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A new contributor to Fair and Unbalanced, sasqi is the pseudonym for a poet, academic and dear friend. Among many other things, she is a Lecturer in Writing at U.C. Santa Cruz. -- Lovechilde]
Dear baby boomers, children of boomers, boomer-lovers, and anyone else who realizes we’re all going to die: I need to recommend the comic-form memoir
Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir by Joyce Farmer, even though I just put it down and said to my husband, “this is not recommendable.” I uttered that because the book is about a woman's two aging parents and the mundane details of their last years. It is an incredibly smart portrayal of the way two elderly people (Lars and Rachel, pseudonyms for Farmer’s parents) slog onward in the face of their obviously imminent demise and of the way their middle aged daughter “Laura” attempts to take care of them. Farmer somehow manages to get humor into the most grimace-inducing emotional episodes, episodes which apparently took place many years before she was able to put them down on paper. But overall this book is not funny or uplifting. The book ponders dying, not death, and Farmer is candid in her assessments.
There is a deep compassion that resides inside Farmer’s dark and meticulously-drawn panels, a compassion which wants to find an alternate reality about what happens when we age--but doesn’t. Farmer’s realistic visual style, accompanied by verbal reminders that her parents’ last years take place, for the most part, in the same house, eating the same food, and saying the same things, reveal a daughter’s quiet horror about the monotony of the aging process. She plays with this by mimicking the traditional panel captions used in comics to tell readers about elapsed time. “Another day,” “Some weeks later,” “Time marches on,” and “Another day, another test” all make appearances at the top of a new page. A reader begins to feel the eventuality of it all.
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