Ephemera: A Memoir

Ephemera: A Memoir
By Briana Loewinsohn
Fantagraphics Books, 2023. 189 pages. Biography/Memoir

Ephemera is a poetic and dreamlike take on a graphic memoir that follows a grown woman's recollection of her early childhood memories and the gossamer existence of her mother. Set in a garden, forest, and greenhouse, it illustrates the story of a daughter trying to relate to a parent who struggles with mental illness. With careful dips forward and back in time, we are guided through the weeds alongside the narrator, adressing quiet themes of isolation, growth, confusion, acceptance, and the fog of childhood. It is an aching, medetative twist on the autobiography, infusing a typically tell-all and straightforward genre with an account laced instead with an ethereal fusion of memory and imagination. 

At times, this memoir felt much less like an autobiography and more like poetry and meditation woven into illustration. Details are sparse in some aspects, but incredibly deep and rich in others, making for a fascinating contrast of focus. For example, while we see the author's brother from time to time in her memories, we are never able to learn his name. Yet no less than a half dozen plants are identified by scientific classification, the author explaining that she learned all of these details and how to care for each plant from her mother. Their relationship is explored in this extended metaphor, describing how poor soil and infrequent water made it difficult for a true mother-daughter bond to flourish between them. And yet a longing remains, the author feeling that if she can just take care of the plants that her mother loved, she could come to know the woman she saw so infrequently in her youth. It is a heartbreaking tale well aware of it's own tragedy that nonetheless clings to a defiant fragment of hope. A beautiful understanding that while some things can be nursed and watered and encouraged into growth, others are simply made to wither, existing for a short time before they fade away. Or in other words, exist as something ephemeral.

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