Tangles

By (author): Sarah Leavitt

What do you do when your outspoken, passionate, and quick-witted mother starts fading into a forgetful, fearful woman? In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother Midge—and her family—forever.

In spare black and white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions—shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration—all the while learning to cope, and managing to find moments of happiness. Midge, a Harvard-educated intellectual, struggles to comprehend the simplest words; Sarah’s father Rob slowly adapts to his new role as full-time caretaker, but still finds time for word-play and poetry with his wife; Sarah and her sister Hannah argue, laugh, and grieve together as they join forces to help Midge get to sleep, rage about family friends who have disappeared, or collapse in tears at the end of a heartbreaking day.

Tangles provides a window on the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease, and ultimately opens a knot of moments, memories, and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.

AUTHOR

Sarah Leavitt

Sarah Leavitt is the author of Tangles: A Story of Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me and Agnes, Murderess. Tangles was published in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Korea, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize in 2010. It is currently in development as a feature-length animation. Leavitt teaches comics classes at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.


Reviews

“Sarah Leavitt uses the medium of comics to tell her story with more economy and power than either words or pictures could muster by themselves. She brings a good eye for the telling detail?the small observations that reveal larger truths?to her memoir of a family in crisis. Tangles is the work of a perceptive, creative, and honest storyteller.”?Brian Fies


Awards

  • Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize 2010, Short-listed
  • CBC Bookie Award for Best Comic of Graphic Novel 2011, Winner
  • Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize 2011, Short-listed
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    Details

    Dimensions:

    132 Pages
    10.50in * 9.25in * .37in
    530.00gr
    1.15lb

    Published:

    September 01, 2010

    Publisher:

    Freehand Books

    ISBN:

    9781551111179

    Language:

    eng

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