Sarah Leavitt’s Wordimaging. Alzheimer’s in a Canadian Graphic Novel

Based on the interdisciplinary experience of the Research Group “Terzo Tempo / Third Time,” at the University of Torino, aimed at promoting active ageing among Senior citizens, this article will analyze the graphic novel by the Canadian writer and artist Sarah Leavitt, Tangles. A story about Alzheimer’s, my mother, and me ([2010] 2012), in which she “honours the meanings of her mother’s narrative of illness” (Charon 2006, p. 3). She gives voice to a suffering family who acts as caregiver for years, while depicting in a very comprehensible way the insurgence of symptoms, the stages of progressive deterioration in her mother’s behavior, and the fatigue of the caregivers. Her work creates a new space for the genre and framework of medical autobiography on cases of severe medical conditions (Kuhlman 2017), but also of “graphic medicine” in the field of Medical Humanities.