Last Things

By -
Last Things: A Graphic Memoir of Loss and Love, by Marissa Moss

Marissa Moss is an author/artist, and you may have seen her Amelia's Notebook series or her excellent picture-book biographies (or, I reviewed The Pharaoh's Secret a few years ago).  These days she has a small publishing company, too.  Her husband, Harvey Stahl, was an art history professor at Berkeley, and this is the story of his diagnosis of ALS and the family's journey through his illness and death.

This is a really, really tough story, and Moss tells it with wrenching honesty.  Harvey's illness hit so hard and fast that there was no time to absorb and come to terms with it.  Instead, he was mostly angry and shut off, while Marissa tried to stretch herself far enough to care for him and their three boys without falling apart.  Harvey only seemed to find solace (if any) in working on the book he'd been writing; each son suffered in his own way; and Marissa struggled to hold her family together, mostly feeling like she was failing everyone.
Last things sneak up on you, slip away, unnoticed, unmarked...the last kiss, the last "I love you"...because we assume there will be others.  We share a lot of "lasts" and don't even know it.
If you're familiar with Moss' work, you'll recognize her style.  It's like her other graphic work, but entirely rendered in black and grays -- no color at all.  Harvey died in 2002, less than seven months after his diagnosis, and just about fifteen years ago.  I think it probably took her that long to be able to write this.  That does make it possible for her to include information on her sons' growing up and her life now, which is really nice to have.  She also finished Harvey's book (and it's coming for me on ILL).

An excellent and extremely painful memoir.  Read it, and have a box of tissues nearby.



Ooh, look, I found a book trailer:

Comments

  1. Ruth @ with freedom and booksMay 18, 2017 at 11:43 AM

    This reminds me of American Widow by Alissa Torres. Her husband died in the WTC on 9/11, and she wrote a graphic novel about her life after. It has the same feel.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more