Raised by Ghosts

by Thomas De Groff

Briana Loewinsohn’s Raised by Ghosts examines an adolescent Briana—left largely neglected after her parents’ divorce—narrating her teenage years and early exposures to cartooning. This is a work that engages with objects beyond the panel to tell its story. Loewinsohn uses a brown paper lunch bag, a sticky note, a Polaroid photograph, and a slew of everyday objects to construct a setting in which to work through the trauma of her childhood. On its notebook-paper title page, Loewinsohn insists her work is a love letter rather than a love story. Loewinsohn endows her comic with a careful sense of direction. Raised by Ghosts is a note passed in class, meant to be intercepted by a teenage audience.

The comic first uses this fascination with everyday objects to establish a careful formal divide. Square selections of panels tell the story of Briana’s youth, and facsimiles of torn and folded notebook paper (or, in one instance, cardboard) are interspersed on facing pages to provide an extra written insight into her state of mind. When Briana cries at a middle-school bus stop, the adjacent note reveals her dissociative state—imagining herself as some historical figure dying of consumption in an attic. When Briana sits by herself at lunch, a note tells the reader that her family has been using an open oven to heat their house. This double narrative allows a neglected, unfed, unkempt and impoverished Briana to be seen and heard. The mundanity of these handwritten inserts connects Loewinsohn’s therapeutic self-expression with the everyday items that made up her childhood in the nineties. Bulletin boards are bedecked with Wu-Tang stickers, movie tickets, a baseball card, and the purple wrapper peeled from a bottle of Cherry Coke. Briana makes a mixtape for a friend on a dual-cassette boombox. Notes on blue-lined paper are folded, passed, and exchanged between misfit friends as a kind of currency.

Comics exist as a backdrop to the teenage drama. Unheard classmates speak in Peanuts’ Woodstock’s vertical dashes, and a boy on Briana’s bus wears a yellow shirt with a familiar Charlie Brown black stripe. Briana laughs at a Far Side comic strip clipping affixed to the door of her father’s empty fridge. Briana admits to reading any comic she can get her hands on, from the underground comix at her father’s house to Sunday strips like Prince Valiant. Finally, watching the musical You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown on VHS triggers a moment of cathartic recognition.

The real epiphany of Raised by Ghosts comes when the notes and the drawings merge. We see Briana wrestle with, then embrace the lines she draws on the page. The ruled lines of the notebook paper become horizontal motion lines for Briana’s drawn form, and now the torn notebook pages and the comic panels overlap, just as a high-school chemistry teacher drones on about covalent bonds. Briana recognizes that there is real therapeutic value in drawing and writing about the traumatic experiences of neglect and loss. She writes that her paper and pencil are saving her—that she no longer feels like she is dying of consumption in an attic because she is herself again.

As both a reminiscence and a response, Raised by Ghosts invites its young adult readers to make their own graphic medicine. Notebooks and sketchbooks are curative for Briana. By sharing her notes and drawings with the reader, Loewinsohn invites anyone in her teenage audience who may relate to a story about depression and neglect to reciprocate. This exploration of therapeutic self-expression becomes explicitly educational when the comic offers up a how-to section on note folding. By writing their own notes, the reader can participate in the exchange of emotion that grants Briana an outlet for her frustration and anguish. Loewinsohn invites her readers to try their hands at self-expression and therapeutic narrations using pencil and paper. The therapeutic everyday objects of Raised by Ghosts then become a meditation on both the things we hold onto and the things we offer up in return.

Editor’s note: Briana Loewinsohn’s first memoir, Ephemera, was reviewed here in 2023.

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Thomas De Groff is a graduate student studying comics at the University of Florida. He draws a weekly comic strip called Mr. Sunday and publishes a monthly zine.