Finding the Light – A Mother’s Journey from Trauma to Healing

by Andrew Field

Sometimes I marvel at the way the medium of the graphic novel seems to approximate certain aspects of the way our memory works.  How we experience our memories can seem deeply visual (the drawings), but also laden with language (the words), if only because thought seems so wedded to language, and memories can sometimes feel like recollected thoughts in the form of images, or recollected images in the form of thoughts.  Memory draws on the resources of language and image, as do graphic novels, and both have a kind of movement, a kind of logic, a kind of language, that taps in different ways into the intelligibility of narrative.  But if there is a fruitful correspondence between the medium of the graphic novel and the way our memory works, it seems doubly important to think about how trauma can be represented in the graphic novel medium, as trauma is something that shuts down episodic memory and fragments the sequentiality of events.  To piece back memory through the confluence of image and word—to restructure the trauma as a living unit, a living whole—then becomes an act of enormous bravery and skill.

Finding the Light: A Mother’s Journey from Trauma to Healing by Marian Henley evidences such bravery and skill.  It is the story of a woman, a mother, and an artist attempting to do the impossible: to make something meaningful out of the experience of trauma, in her case as the victim of sexual assault. There are no standards for verisimilitude—Henley could have chosen a myriad of ways of representing not just sexual assault but her life including the sexual assault, and the book in a major way is about her life, including the assault, rather than just being about the assault—but in Finding the Light Henley hits on a right combination of elements to tell her story poignantly, lyrically, and honestly.  Finding the Light is framed by the narrator’s relationship to her adopted son, which provides a kind of buffer and trail of crumbs for beginning to discuss the experiences of sexual assault, which happened twice, when she was 19 in her dorm room in the 1970s, and once at gunpoint at a clothing store some twenty years later.  Through drawings that have a kind of lightness to them, Henley delves into the world of her family, including her husband and adopted son, before moving into a flashback to portray her experience in college, the rape, and the aftermath of the rape, including a trial with a gaslighting defense attorney. We return to her son in the second half, before encountering Henley as an adult, including her experience of the second sexual assault.  There is a seamlessness to Henley’s ability to move back and forth, from past to present, and the story feels painful but somehow effortless in the telling.  This is a major achievement, as one reflects on the way in which trauma tears the habitual sequence-after-sequence of narrative and ruptures our traditional ways of making meaning or making sense.  The drawings, in keeping with this effortlessness and rupture, are in black and white, and have a kind of nervous wryness to them, often accentuated by a wash of grey or black that suggests insubstantiality or a dream-like feeling, suggestive of shadows, auras, and even a kind of disassociation, though muted.  It is a story told somehow lightly, with a sense of care, concern, and humor, but also with authority and fearlessness. Henley finds a language for her suffering, and in so doing finds a kind of earned redemption through her art of memory.

Editor’s note: Marian Henley was the creator of the tenderhearted, memoirish ­Maxine comic strip from October 1981 – December 2002. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Henley also wrote her graphic memoir about the adoption of her son; entitled The Shiniest Jewel and reviewed at https://www.graphicmedicine.org/comic-reviews/bearing-stories/.

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Andrew Field is a cartoonist who often writes and draws about mental health and illness.  He recently finished a graphic novella, The Light-Haunted Museum, about a narrator growing up with schizophrenia, which can be found on his website, www.andrewfield48.com.