Breaking Up [at/with] Illness Narratives

Abstract

In recent years, the proliferation of illness memoir/autobiographical comics, in print and online, has led to ruptures within totalizing genre conventions that continue to inform writing about illness. Specifically, the genres of autobiographical comics and illness narratives, when brought together, form a subgenre of graphic novels that disrupt several imperatives inherited from ancient rhetoric for confessional writing. Such classical imperatives promote the fantasy of a coherent, autonomous self, seek to provide a rationale for illness, and move along the narrative trajectory from illness to recovery. However, in illness memoir/autobiographical comics, narrators commonly find themselves at odds with the diagnosis and expectations associated with their illness or disability, as Ellen Forney does in Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. In other texts, such as Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened, artists struggle to rationalize the initial onset of their illness and to conclude their narrative with hopeful resolution. Far from demonstrating a lack of creativity on the part of such artists, these struggles to negotiate shifting identities and form narrative structures for unstructured illness experiences may rather be emblematic of the period in which we live.