ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of memory in the construction of autobiographical accounts of childhood and illness in Epileptic (2005) by David B. and Stitches: A Memoir (2009) by David Small. The chapter argues that comics offer a varied and verdant field through which to explore the body, gesture, and traumatic memories because of the gap between word and image, and in the way that comics complicate the representation of time, much like the structure of episodic memory. As examples from the field of ‘graphic medicine’, Epileptic and Stitches adopt markedly different visual strategies to recall experiences of illness, and share a concern for conveying the broad range of emotional, psychological, imaginative, as well as somatic traces of illness that reach beyond the biomedical model of treatment. The recollection of encounters with medical professionals and spaces of treatment play a central role in both texts, which represent, respectively, the impact of these memories in intimate, affective, and non-discursive ways.
