Drawing Fragmented Narratives: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the productive role of the comics/graphic novels as a medium in representing illness, and more specifically Alzheimer’s disease. The author first comments on the in/adequacy of language to verbalize and communicate pain and illness. Many detailed studies have been devoted to this topic; Virginia Woolf’s seminal reflection will be used as a major starting point. In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Woolf meditates upon the “poverty of the language” in matters of illness, thus bringing to the fore a lexical rift between the patients’ illness and the clinician’s treatment, a discrepancy that continues to affect contemporary biomedical culture. The second part of this chapter will focus on the comics/graphic novel as a (possible) medium to overcome the above-mentioned limits of language. With this critical framework in mind, in the third part, the author analyzes the graphic memoir Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath in which the author narrates the experiences of her mother Alice and her coping with Alzheimer’s