Cirrus@Austlit

'Traditionally, memoir writers use ‘prose’ to build narratives. Sometimes they use images, but often not. In the multimedia age some memoirists are turning to art, photography, design, typography, and technology to increase the range and scope of their research and ‘writing’. Writing, in this sense, takes on a more Derridean flavour, and comes to incorporate all manner of inscriptions. Readers consequently become viewers, and texts shift from ‘readerly’ to ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense. Design software like Adobe InDesign helps make such bricolages possible, and helps overcome some of the design limitations of mainstream word processors. By combining elements of a/r/tography, applied grammatology, autoethnography, and creative non-fiction, I have created a graphic memoir bricolage to explore the death of my mother and the difficulties of narrating it. By combining words and images—design and content—I have come some way to articulating the challenges of this process.' (Author's abstract)