Look Again

Look Again Q&A with Elizabeth A. Trembley

What do you hope people will get out of this book?

I hope the book helps readers understand how trauma, memory, identity, storytelling, shame, and healing all tangle together. In the middle of a traumatizing event, we may act in ways that later make absolutely no sense. This can bring doubt and shame. And though we struggle to, we cannot make sense of it, because the memory of what happened lives in fragments, images of specific moments of sensation or thought. Not linked by chronology the way usual memories are.

When I found the dead body, I thought my life was in danger. And my brain searched the “files,” my memories, for ideas to help me survive. These included images from mystery and crime stories, images of how an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time might avoid getting killed. That drove how I reacted that morning. Like walking deeper into the woods even though my car was little more than 100 yards behind me.

Why is it important that your story be told in comics form?

Comics are built from fragments, the panels and the gaps. Gaps where you can’t see what actually happened and your mind tries to fill it in. And that is like what happened with the gaps in my memory. Comics also engage both the verbal and visual parts of your brain. Whether reading comics or creating them, you are engaging in a sophisticated and complex literary task. Creating graphic memoir, visual storytelling, allows material to exit your mind in unique ways. It allows for both the telling of a story of the past and the reflection on it at the same time. It enables you to create a sense of yourself (and other readers) as witnesses. And for traumatic memory in particular, this is important because you are not just telling people what happened, or how fragmented and jumbled and disjointed from time it all is. You show them by creating it that way on the page. The experience of reading comics is amazing that way.