Bearing Griefs while Dancing at the Pity Party
摘要
This chapter analyses Feder’s graphic memoirMemoir Pity Party, which recounts her experience of griefGrief following the death of her mother from cancer about a decade earlier. The chapter has implications for creative-practice research and considers how Feder’s creative process of composing and producing her comic provides her with a means of processing her griefGrief. It expands upon the understanding of griefGrief as inescapably transformative and illustrates how an initially overwhelming experience often becomes connected to others as the sufferer gradually integrates these into the broader networks of their life. This chapter emphasizes the comic’s use of narrative complexityNarrative complexity and several devices that compel a participatory reading/viewing experience, such as game playing, cumulationCumulation and combinationCombination, which preserve aspects of overwhelming experience. As such, it also demonstrates how analyses of griefGrief comics and graphic medicineGraphic medicine scholarship that accommodate a focus on form may further expand literary traumaTrauma theoryLiterary trauma theory’s current understandings of griefGrief.