The ephemerata Shaping the exquisite nature of grief

"Death is when the sugar is gone." While loss and grief are popular subjects for graphic memoir, Tyler's latest does more than trace familiar paths, and it certainly does not seek to offer self-help tips to anyone. In a splendid mix of traditional nine-panel grids, full-page spreads, and what can only be described as illustrated manuscript pages, Tyler invites readers to accept the inevitability of grief as a cost of a life well lived and well loved. In weaving more than a decade's worth of grief-causing and grief-informed events together, she offers readers a glimpse of the myriad ways grief can come to encompass every waking or dreaming moment and persuades that we must all find ways to live within it. With few splashes of color, an at-times dizzying mix of real moments, dreamscapes, and imagined worlds, and runs of pages where there is more text than it feels should even fit within a single comics page, this is not a quick or easy read. But it is one that, like the best poetry, will leave the reader pondering each line for days, weeks, months to come.

In this intricate, wildly inventive graphic memoir from Eisner nominee Tyler (Soldier's Heart), grief is a physical place populated by odd but helpful guides. Carol is hit by an "anvil of sorrow" when her mother, sister, and multiple friends die in quick succession, and she enters a "long residency in Griefville." Griefville is depicted as a "dolorous thicket" inhabited by "Clorins," humanoids with long pointy fingers and screwhead eyes. She acknowledges the many types and stages of grief with reverence and explores a "legacy" of mourning through scenes of ancestors dealing with loss, leading her to realize: "I'm not the first to go through this." But a voice counters that even tough loss iscommon, "That does not diminish your situation. It connects you." The particulars of Carol's personal losses emerge more than a third of the way through the volume, as she trudges through the indignities of daily life while caring for her cancer-stricken sister; meanwhile, her mother's decline means dealing with her domineering father. In the third section, Carol's adult daughter and her boyfriend--both ostensibly sober--move in with her to weather a bad economy. But Carol quickly gets entangled in the boyfriend's drug problems and financial schemes, generating grief in and for her relationship with her daughter. Detailed and often dreamlike, Tyler's pen and ink illustrations are punctuated with occasional, muted washes of color. In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative. (Oct.)