In doing this, Leavitt can show her mother’s continuous presence in her life with a single image. Leavitt knows when pictures can do a better job than words, such as when she shows her room at college and uses the image to show herself wrapped in an afghan her mother made. It’s much easier for her to interrupt the story and illustrate with a picture what would normally take paragraphs to describe, and it matches her writing style well. I like Leavitt’s decision to make “Tangles” a graphic novel. The book has the potential to impact readers on multiple levels.

By the end of Leavitt’s mother’s life, she slept often, barely ate and was unable to recognize her husband or daughters. Relatives must stand by as someone they love loses their memory and cognitive abilities. My knowledge of Alzheimer’s was limited to knowing it caused memory loss, but it’s much more than that. She catalogs her mother’s decline, from normal memory lapses to needing help brushing her teeth to no longer understanding when to use the bathroom and going in her pants. In sharing her story, Leavitt gives a deeply personal account of what it’s like to have someone you love develop Alzheimer’s, and there’s no way you can read this book without being impacted by it. “Tangles” details Leavitt’s experience caring for her mother as Alzheimer’s disease slowly took her life, taking its name from the tangles that form in the brain when someone develops Alzheimer’s as well as from the tangles in relationships as a result of the disease. I don’t often read graphic novels, so reading “Tangles” by Sarah Leavitt, one of the featured writers at the upcoming UND Writer’s Conference, was an interesting experience.

Tangles by sarah leavitt