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My Kind of Crazy: A Graphic Memoir





Price: $39.95

Page Count: 250

Publication Date: August 2023

ISBN: 978-1-77258-450-9

This graphic memoir looks at intergenerational experiences of domestic and gender-based violence through a maternal gaze. The book’s 13 chapters document a mother’s attempts to reconcile violent incidents through visual representation, psychically reordering them in the context of her changing temporal body. The unexpected return of trauma memories captured in mixed media reveals an intricate balance between remembering and forgetting. Snippets of memory collide on the page, illustrating in bold graphics and fragmented text how maternal bodies react to claim or reject the stories memory brings. At question is how violence interacts with mental health, addiction, disability, gender, and language, and where or if accountability for transgressions exists except in the author’s mind. While pushing the boundaries of ethical storytelling, this research-creation text explores trauma memory in a textured overlay of images and text. The textured hand-made paper cradles a constant search for identity, opening up the body surgically and metaphorically while pieces are changed, damaged, and removed. Violent acts entrenched in the social fabrics of domestic life disrupt mothering practices rendered in circular frames to symbolize mothers’ resilience and their life-giving wombs.

My Kind of Crazy features abuse, addiction, assholes across all genders, and art. It is about growth and reclaiming the territory that people try to take away. It tracks the author’s straight parenting and gay parenting, and draws out – in images and words – the beauty and the continuity of mothering through difficulty and change. As a work on trauma and memory, it is self-critical and reflective, with the author an asshole too now and then. The moments of dark humour are a joy. When it ends, it doesn’t end, and you are left with hope and advice: “Hang on. Don’t let go!”

- Jane Tolmie, Queen’s University, editor of Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry

Author’s Forward ................... Psychoanalytic Feminism, Trauma Memory, Women's Bodies, Art Activism, and Power, in My Kind of Crazy
Chapter 1 Crazy
Chapter 2 Angry

Chapter 3 Powerless

Chapter 4 Afraid

Chapter 5 Broken

Chapter 6 Burned

Chapter 7 Cut

Chapter 8 Devastated

Chapter 9 Disillusioned

Chapter 10 Dismantled

Chapter 11 Rebuilt

Chapter 12 Dissected

Chapter 13 Destroyed

Chapter 14 Diagnosed

Author’s Afterword ................................................................................................................ No Final Word

Lorinda Peterson is an author, poet, and artist living in Kingston, Ontario. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Queen’s University where she currently works as an academic assistant for online writing courses. Her graphic novel My Kind of Crazy comprises part of the research-creation for her dissertation together with a poetry collection, Catastrophic Imaginaries. Lorinda has four children, eight grandchildren, two dogs, and a horse that occupy her spare time.