Word: memoirize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a telling anecdote in David Frum's new memoir of his year as a White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. Early in the presidency, Frum--who later received credit for the deathless, and perhaps senseless, phrase "axis of evil"--submits a speech. The President eviscerates it. Frum asks why. "The material he had hacked out," Frum writes, "seemed to me the headline story of the event. Bush shook his head at me. The Headline is: BUSH LEADS...
...wait a minute. Let's go back to Frum's anecdote; a metaphor may lurk within. Frum doesn't say what the speech was about, and he doesn't specify what Bush cut from the text--this is only a tell-some memoir. But one can assume that Bush has cut the details of the policy. And that fits too: there has been a vaporous quality to Bush's boldness. He traffics in headlines. The policies themselves are often not entirely baked. A case in point: Frum's "axis of evil" and its accompanying doctrine of pre-emption, which Bush...
...David's head is splintered, "Inside it's as tidy and rich as Fort Knox." At the end, in a sad twist the final panel shows Gorilla behind bars with David, calling him, "the best roommate a fella could want." This sort of visual editorial is what separates comix memoir from prose. But while Paul Karasik does a nice enough job of relating his brother's illness, his approach seems conservative compared to last year's intensely ambitious and beautiful "Epileptic," by David B. Also a memoir about a brother's mental illness, "Epileptic" dared to go beyond exploring...
...September 11, 2001. Living with his wife and two young sons in the Battery Park City complex of apartment buildings that were mere blocks from the catastrophe, his story gives a first-hand account of the chaos visited on lower Manhattan that day. While there have been many memoir comix about 9/11 (see TIME.comix reviews: part one; part two), most of them recount the mediated experience of those outside of ground zero. "Tuesday" gives us the first detailed, longform story of living through that nightmarish experience...
...Written in a visual language that would otherwise have taken up thousands of words of prose, comix allow not only for a more efficient and less expensive approach to memoir, but a richer one as well. "Ride Together" and "Tuesday" are just two fine examples of this arguably superior method of relating personal history...