The Flying Couch

Onto another book that uses an art medium to convey a message.  The Flying Couch is a graphic novel, written and drawn by Amy Kurzwell.  Amy is a writer and cartoonist who has drawn for the New Yorker magazine.  Using the medium of cartoon and graphic art to weave her memoir, she brings us her personal history in this novel form.

In this book Kurzwell has found another way to tell her life story and the story of her grandmother's escape from the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust.  She dedicates the book to the her mother and grandmother, "the women who made me".  She starts off with herself as a young child with unusual interests.  She is the daughter of a psychologist and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.  She explains her story in reference to those experiences.  Her mother always analyzing her, "Sometimes we create minor anxieties for ourselves...to distract us from what we're really anxious about."   Later, when she is becoming a Bat Mitzvah and trying to understand her place int he Jewish religion, her grandmother, starts to tell her about her childhood experiences during the Holocaust.  Bubbie tells stories, "Oh I could tell you so many stories, I have stories and stories, A thousand and one stories..."  As Kurzwell grows up and moves through Hebrew School to College and onto her won adult life in Brooklyn working and drawing she wrestles with the relationships with her mother and grandmother.  Call too much, call not enough.  It is the age old story of women and their mothers.  Amy writes, "The women in my family have certain stories to tell.  Why does it feel like I am not the protagonist of my own life?"

It is the problem of the ages, breaking away but not leaving the past behind.  Watching and participating as your Bubbie ages and finds out that she is not independent anymore, watching your own mother age, and trying to keep your independence at the same time.

The format is sometimes hard to read, the pictures sometimes jumbled, but the message is there.