Grieving in Carol Tyler’s New Graphic Memoir

It’s been 20 years since Carol Tyler made her debut with Late Bloomer, a collection of smaller stories she had published in various small comic magazines in the late twentieth century. At that time, Tyler humorously described herself in the calligraphically text-heavy introduction as living in Bloomerland, a place of optimism regarding her career finally seeming to start to flourish. But with her latest book, The Ephemerata, Tyler finds herself in a very different sort of allegorical space

— Griefville. though not too different from the real world, Griefville is where Tyler finds herself continuously metaphorically haunted by the fact that in 2011, a lot of important people in her life started dying. It isn’t going to stop. And Tyler is well aware of the fact that, however painful grieving may be, it is an inexorable facet of the human condition.

Like Tyler’s previous graphic novel memoirs, The Ephemerata drops characters, ideas, and vibes in without context or explanation giving the book a dizzyingly episodic feel. Though the comics industry has long since moved on from the zine culture of the nineties, Tyler still maintains much of that era’s structure, or lack thereof. Much of what gives Tyler’s work such a unique perspective/feeling/flow is her willingness to switch topics abruptly, and seemingly at random. Though the book opens with Tyler’s painstakingly detailed garden in beautifully crafted crosshatching, bursting with imagined color even as it exists in mere black-and-white, she then transitions to more traditional panels detailing her mother’s relationship with gardening. That series leads to her mother’s sickness which in turn leads to Tyler’s garden in disarray. The metaphor is an obvious one- the garden is a reflection of Tyler’s ability to maintain it, and constant 400 mile caregiving visits take a physical as well as an emotional toil.

The stories in The Ephemerata bleed into one another as do the visuals. As the traditional comics grid shifts into illustration and back again, Tyler bridges the gap between the pain of everyday living and the grief of dying. When in the final page, we see Tyler crying barbed tears of grief, the point being made is that the strange way Tyler grieves – through making graphic memoirs — is because it gives her the means to give structure and meaning to grief that continues to bewilder her in incomprehensible pain.

The Ephemerata
By Carol Tyler
Fantagraphics; 232 pages

The Ephemerata lacks a clear chronology. Tyler discusses the emotional toil of her estrangement from her daughter Julia long before she draws the sequence of events that caused the two to drift apart . Appearing near the end of the book, the story of Julia’s terrible boyfriend Graham is borderline slapstick. Tyler presents this story out of sequence less for comic relief — though it provides that — and more to emphasize how incredibly frustrating his behavior was for her, given her bereavements / personal tragedies After long stretches of deliberative melancholy, it’s almost relieving for Tyler that she finally had a chance to outhustle the hustlers.

Tyler can’t beat death that has consumed her friends, parents, and husband, and she can’t beat people’s unsettling and often hurtful behavior, especially that of her family,. But she can at least accomplish smaller, more modest goals. Another sequence where Tyler reluctantly agrees to bury a neighbor’s dog is powerful because the slapstick contrasts sharply with the escalating physical danger of the situation. Tyler isn’t comfortable drawing the way she imagines her neighbor abusing the dog, since her suspicions are just that- suspicions. The coming storm, though, is quite real, and Tyler can depict her experience there without concern, as well as her own motivation. Namely, that the poor dog can at least rest outside rather than stinking up its owner’s basement.

Tyler has to pick her battles, and grounds herself by trying to focus more on problems she can at least solve, though even these are limited. Tyler acknowledges that the artistic process itself isn’t as therapeutic as she’d like. There’s one scene where Tyler idly fantasizes about illustrating an old, obsolete book of scientific biographies that had been destined to burn before she decided to rescue it. Tyler sees the value of the book, how it’s a literal repository of memories, yet fully acknowledges there’s only so much she can do with a finite amount of creative energy.

In terms of physical energy, Tyler is able to do as good a job looking after her mother and sister in their dying days as is reasonably possible. Unfortunately, with her father, Tyler gets badly caught up with his selfishishness: using microaggressions like turning up the TV volume or thoughtlessly cutting down some trees to worsen his long suffering wife’s mental state. The Ephemerata is very much a story about perspective- Tyler’s own anguish frequently depicted in close-up, while others are seen from farther away. Her father looks almost cute in his little wheelchair in smaller panels, a disturbing yet appropriate contrast to his attitude at times feeling almost inhuman. This is because Tyler quite literally can’t relate to them, despite both of them trying to cope with the same anguish of her mother’s imminent death.

And all these vignettes connect, not always intuitively or intentionally. Panels discussing the home life of Tyler with her husband Justin Green, for example, echo disturbingly with the physical distance of their odd duplex living arrangement. Neither of them can quite forgive Green for a past love affair, rendering their semi-separate lives practical. Tyler Contrasts this to her mother’s oppressive home life where she is almost always in the room with her husband. Tyler’s fear of becoming her parents is less because she dislikes her parents, but more because she fears losing her self-awareness.

This entire memoir acts as a sort of balm for that fear, just as it did with her previous graphic novels. Yet for all conceited focus, Tyler doesn’t judge any of the memoir’s less sympathetic characters, or at least tries to avoid doing so any more than she has to. As it says right there in the title, we are all ephemera, never knowing how much time we have in this world or whether we have made good use of it. From this vantage point, it’s creepily appropriate that the book opens up with an introduction where Tyler discusses how this book will have a second part. Ironically, this may well have been the only real bit of arrogance on Tyler’s part- thinking originally that she could tell a complete picture of grief in only 232 pages. Death is a process that cannot, and will not, ever end, and there’s a good chance that either The Ephemerata or its sequel will become Tyler’s own epigraph.