During the course of numerous visits home, Sarah began to keep a journal and draw in sketchbooks, until her mother died in 2004. At the time, Sarah had already been living in Vancouver for a while, with her parents and older sister, Hannah, in Fredericton. Two years later, Midge Leavitt was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

When Sarah Leavitt's mother, Midge, first began to show the early symptoms of her illness in 1996 - leaving a hot iron unattended on the board, sitting in the car alone for too long after everyone else has got out, going for a walk and sometimes forgetting her return way home, suddenly unable to open a door or answer the ringing phone - she was only 52. But it is not until the attentive members are forced to loosen their hold that they will discover themselves newly defined through their loss. Not only a spot-on portrait of the dark comedy and vast sadness that Alzheimer’s contains, the book is a fitting tribute to Leavitt’s mom.Once the uninvited guest of illness trespasses and enters a household, a family is reshaped to form the essential circle of care around the one who is sick. As she does, day by day Midge’s mind erases more of her past, and the future becomes less certain. In her graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse), Sarah Leavitt tries to hold on to her beloved mother, Midge, and unknot the tensions that arise between friends and family. W, who locked her in a coal bin and threatened her with exorcism, casting herself as the plucky hero in a Dickens novel. Not surprisingly, Winterson dresses up her rather rundown English childhood in myth, with her mother, called Mrs.

Queer literary icon Jeanette Winterson also faces down the mommy monster in her bewitching memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove), the title drawn from the reaction Winterson’s adoptive mother had to her daughter’s coming out as a lesbian. The way “My mother composed me as I now compose her.” Told through a series of therapy sessions, with the specters of Virginia Woolf and Daniel Winnicott hovering nearby, Bechdel draws out the ways in which growing up with a depressed, narcissistic mother, who had once dreamed of being an artist herself, have colored her world. Now I’ve fallen hard for Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama(Houghton Mifflin), Bechdel’s illustrated analysis of her uneasy relationship with her distant and prickly mom. I was lucky enough to lose my graphic-memoir innocence to Alison Bechdel and her 2007 best-selling memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which looked at the life of her father, a high-school English teacher, part-time mortician, and full-time closeted gay man who committed suicide at 44, through the prism of her own sexuality.

Tangles by Sarah Leavitt