Graphic Medicine

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Walrath writes that creating this book allowed her not only to process her grief over her mother's dementia, but also "to remember the magic laughter of that time." Graphic medicine, she writes, "lets us better understand those who are hurting, feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate those social boundaries. Most of all, it gives us a way to heal and to fly over the world as Alice does."

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant shows the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
In the next installment of her graphic travelogue series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather's WWII memoir, which is excerpted. Readers will identify with Knisley's frustration, her fears, her compassion, and her attempts to come to terms with mortality, as she copes with the stress of travel complicated by her grandparents' frailty.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Set in Los Angeles in the early '90s, Parker recalls the inexorable decline of her parents' health against a backdrop of wider social unrest. Their affectionate bickering, black humour and tender resignation to fading youth are captured perceptively and truthfully by Farmer, in what is widely regarded as one of the finest graphic memoirs ever produced.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
In this powerful memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer's disease transformed her mother, Midge, and her family forever. Tangles confronts the complexity of Alzheimer's disease, and ultimately releases a knot of memories and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.