Special Exits [Hardcover]

Joyce Farmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2010

A major, original graphic memoir in the vein of Fun Home.

Joyce Farmer’s memoir chronicles the decline of the author’s parents’ health, their relationship with one another and with their their daughter, and how they cope with the day-to-day emotional fragility of the most taxing time of their lives.

Elderly parents Lara and Rachel, who have enjoyed a long and loving married life together, are rendered in fine, confident pen lines. Set in southern Los Angeles (which makes for a terrifying sequence as blind Rachel and ailing Lars are trapped in their home without power during the 1992 Rodney King riots), backgrounds and props are lovingly detailed: these objects serve as memory triggers for Lars and Rachel, even as they eventually overwhelm them and their home, which the couple is loathe to leave. Special Exits is laid out in an eight-panel grid, which creates a leisurely storytelling pace that not only helps to convey the slow, inexorable decline in Lars’ and Rachel’s health, but perfectly captures the timbre of the exchanges between a long-married couple: the affectionate bickering; their gallows humor; their querulousness as their bodies break down.

Though Lars and Rachel are the protagonists of Special Exits, Farmer makes her voice known through creative visual metaphors and in her indictment of the careless treatment of the elderly in nursing homes. Special Exits gracefully deals with the hard reality of caring for aging loved ones: those who are or who have been in similar situations might find comfort in it, and those who haven’t will find much to admire in the bravery and good humor of Lars and Rachel. Joyce Farmer, best known for co-creating the Tits ’n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix, spent 11 years crafting Special Exits, a graphic memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Frank Stack’s Our Cancer Year, about caring for her dying father and stepmother. 208 pages of black-and-white comics

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Underground feminist comic artist Farmer's account of how she looked after her aging parents is a quiet wonder. Lars and Rachel are long retired and don't venture out much from their South Los Angeles home except to go to the grocery store. Lars reads the paper, and both eagerly look forward to visits from their daughter (named Laura but presumably Farmer's stand-in) as much as they don't want to trouble her. Over the course of years that cascade through Farmer's closely detailed story, Lars and Rachel slowly become needier, but do their best to hide their decrepitude from Laura. As the years pass (the 1992 Rodney King riots threaten to make their existence even more perilous), Laura teases out small facts about her parents that she'd never known--the bags of uranium ore that Lars, an engineer, keeps in the garage, Rachel's desperately poor Missouri childhood. Farmer renders everything in busy, densely packed black-and-white frames whose cluttered look mimics the dusty house, its surfaces thick with cat hair and memories. The story is stunning for its antisentimental realism, as well as for the glimpses of fantasy (Lars's hallucination of Hades' ferryman, Charon, rowing by in the hallway) that flicker by like ghosts.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Farmer, one of the first women underground-comics creators (Tits & Clits Comix), draws on her own experience of her father’s and stepmother’s last years to create this “graphic memoir,” which is in effect an autobiographical graphic novel though with the names of family and friends changed. The narrative proceeds like conventional realistic fiction, chronologically and without authorial commentary; it’s dramatic rather than ruminative and reflective. In a liney style similar to that of the late Harvey Pekar’s favorite artist, Frank Stack (Dorman’s Doggie, 1990; The New Adventures of Jesus, 2007), Farmer portrays a middle-aged woman’s ever-more-frequent visits to her parents’ house in south L.A. as they reach and surpass 80, but there’s much more of the old couple at home (nearly the only setting for the entire book) as first her stepmother, then her father, declines toward death. Emotional and physical crises are depicted naturalistically, never hyped up to tug the heartstrings or extort pity, and the parents’ personalities are convincingly and lovingly evoked. The end-of-life literature is vast and mostly practical and advisory. Though not without value as counsel, Farmer’s contribution is primarily a work of art, moving and beautiful. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics (December 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 160699381X
• ISBN-13: 978-1606993811
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.9 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #154,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #58 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Publishers > Fantagraphics

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A true work of art January 14, 2011

By Roberta

Joyce Farmer's skillfully and painstakingly-drawn epic is a true work of art in every sense. It tells the deceptively simple story of a middle aged woman coping with the advancing age, increasing health problems and inevitable death of her parents--something almost all of us have faced, or eventually will--quite the opposite of the popular notion of "comic books" being all about fantasy and escapism. It is rich with so much detail, in the dialogue and interactions, "between the lines" and hidden in the detailed, well-drawn illustrations. We learn of the lives of these people as they are slowly ending, and of the quietly heroic efforts of the daughter to keep a measure of dignity in their lives. The creator is a well known pioneer of feminist underground comics in the early 1970s and 80s, co-founder of a women-run publishing company, and it is a joy to be able to experience a true masterpiece created in her later career. This book should appeal to anyone who can appreciate a heartfelt story of real life, in particular those who may not think they are readers of "comic books."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely story, and not altogether dark October 24, 2011

By MZ

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This graphic novel tells the story of the last years, and eventual death, of the elderly couple Lars and Rachel as they live out their declining years alone in their crumbling house in a shabby Los Angeles neighborhood. But they're not all alone: Lars's devoted daughter Laura attends them once a week, making arrangements to take this time off her business at some expense. She uncomplainingly--enthusiastically, even--cleans their house, bathes the bedridden old woman (her stepmother), does their shopping and cooking, takes their cat to the vet--basically keeps them going, and does so with affection and almost unbelievable good nature.

She has a husband, son, and grandchild who also play a small part in cheering the old people, as do a couple of nearby friends. There are tender conversations between the family members that let you know how much they have cared for each other over the years. The situation is somewhat dire: Rachel neglects her eye drops and becomes blind from glaucoma; Lars falls an injures himself, and the predictable horrors take place as the increasingly-helpless couple lives on semi-independently. They resist live-in caregivers, placing a greater burden on the uncomplaining family.

The graphic novel form does the story great justice. You can see the humor, exasperation, fear, and more ordinary emotions play on the characters' faces. Little side jokes give the story extra pleasure--the mean Siamese cat, which the old couple adores and which hates Laura. It's a wonderful medium; allowing the reader to also be the viewer, and bringing one closer to the characters and their very realistic drama. Farmer's illustrations look as if they want to tell a dark story, but not so. She captures facial expressions elegantly, both funny and tragic, letting the pictures themselves describe the scenes and emotions. Needless to say, this is the story many, many baby-boom aged readers are also right in the midst of coping with.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hit the nail on the head February 28, 2011

By David J. Reider

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Anyone with aging parents will not only appreciate this wonderful book, but empathize with the author, who had to carefully describe, analyze, process, and visualize the very emotions and actions we all are either going through with our own parents, or will soon. It lays a healthy degree of both reality and humor upon an otherwise dismal landscape.