“Magic and Laughter”: Graphic Medicine, Recasting Alzheimer Narratives and Dana Walrath's Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass

“Magic and Laughter”: Graphic Medicine, Recasting Alzheimer Narratives and Dana Walrath's Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass

While the dominant biomedical discourse reduces individuals afflicted with Alzheimer's to Lewy bodies, certain cultural discourses (mediated through films, fiction, comics and other forms) treat them as zombies. Recasting such depictions of Alzheimer's disease (AD) sufferers, Dana Walrath in her graphic memoir Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass narrates the tribulations of her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, Alice, conjuring up an alternative visual and textual world. Aliceheimer's is about the experiences of Alice, before and during AD. In equating the experiences of her mother with the dense fantasy world of Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Walrath not only offers a particularly complex response to AD but also frames it as “a time of healing and magic” (4). Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on self/personhood, examines how Walrath's Aliceheimer's cultivates alternatives to the biomedical and cultural figurations of AD through the use of collage form, positive lexical choices, and a creative appropriation of Wonderland.