PW conversations with Sarah Leavitt

Leavitt processes her grief over her partner’s physician-assisted suicide in diary comics in Something, not nothing (Arsenal Pulp, September).

What role did diary writing play in your grieving process?

I realize that I can’t remember things unless I write them down. When my partner died, my general feeling was, “I can’t believe this is happening.” Especially because Donimo’s death was an assisted suicide. Since I had no clues to the situation, it was important to record them. Because when you try to remember later, you try to explain and organize things, rather than just letting them be strange and surreal.

During some of your worst moments in the book, you wrote a lot of fragmented questions. What was the decision behind that?

When I was working on these pages, I was in the early stages of grief. It’s different than now. It’s been four and a half years since Donimo died. When I was making these comics, everything was still super raw. I was working instinctively, moving through the panels without much conscious planning. That seemed like the only way to express the strangeness. Like I was thinking, “Well, we planned for her to die on April 21st at 2 p.m.” I ran out of words for it. I fragmented the text because that made the most sense to express what was going on inside me. I started playing more with abstraction, broken text, and poetic approaches. That fluidity is something I appreciate about comics.

This broken form was what you needed emotionally in this terribly tense time?

The strange thing was that the actual experience of making art was joyful. I was grieving, but I found a new way of making art. It was something concrete. Grief is not just sadness.

How does it feel for you to talk about the book now?

I want to be conscious. Donimo chose to die, but she had no other choice. I fully support the right to die and think that everyone should have access to it. But it is not nice. You have to imagine what it is like to be in a place where dying is better than living. I never want to lose sight of that.

I want to talk about grief, about how we process it – how we talk about it. But I also want to have conversations about what you can do with comics, how you can manipulate and expand the comic form, and how you can express grief creatively.