THE EPHEMERATA: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, by Carol Tyler
The morning after I started reading Carol Tyler’s gigantic graphic novel — Part 1 of 2 — about the nature of grief, I learned that I would be attending my beloved grandmother’s funeral, and that is the moment when the volume in my hands seemed to change from a memoir to a sort of guidebook.
Mourning, at least in my experience, is like being kidnapped, blindfolded and then pushed out of a car that is passing through Narnia at top speed. The terrain is unfamiliar, there’s a lot of pain in unexpected places and anything recognizable has some quality that makes it as shocking as a talking lion. The first section of “The Ephemerata” takes place in a fantasy world a lot like the heavily symbolic magical lands of C.S. Lewis or Norton Juster, where Tyler, transported by her sorrow, must learn to survive.
I found myself nodding along at its eccentricities. Of course Tyler finds refuge in a giant version of her great-grandmother Theola’s mourning bonnet. Of course all over the landscape there are surrealist not-quite-trees poking up at the sky. Of course these things are explained by the locals of “Griefville” in ways that enthusiastically refuse to make sense. As is often the case at a funeral, the going is rough but the company is good.
The book’s middle sections seem at first like a more straightforward memoir, and the most obvious function they serve is to showcase Tyler’s powers of observation. Her mother is the first to die, then her sister, then a beloved neighbor. More follow; all of their departures are uniquely difficult. But Tyler takes pains to present herself as unsympathetic, even needy. Her piercing gaze is focused inward, itemizing losses and gauging her reactions to them.
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