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"

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.