Ephemera was a difficult book for me to read, but that’s not a warning—if anything, it’s a recommendation.
Ephemera: A Memoir
Briana Loewinsohn
Fantagraphics
March 21, 2023
I’ve been circling around, trying to figure out how to write about this. That’s rare for me these days—you write a hundred or so reviews and it starts to feel like a process you’ve got down pat. Every once in a while, though, something comes along and challenges you as both a reader, and a writer.
Ephemera is a book about loss, but more than that, it’s a book about absence, and it’s very good at highlighting the difference between the two. It’s a memoir by Briana Loewinsohn about a lot of things: her relationship with her mother, the way depression eats up a life, the way that grief snarls what remains.
The distribution of Loewinsohn’s prose is sparse. Much of the story is told through panels that fill the page with open air and stretches of grass. Nothing here is a clean white—not even the panel gutters. Everything is printed with a toothy paper texture which is either laid over the art or else reproduced from the original—either way, it’s clear that it’s not the paper the book is actually printed on. That rankles me a bit, I think. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the aesthetic of aged paper, of toothy paper, even. But I do dislike when the conceptual effect doesn’t match the actual tactile presentation of the book. At the same time, however, I appreciate the way it modulates the tone of the book; the way the overall presentation feels more naturalistic, more in-tune with the flora presented on each page.
It would be cliché, I think, to say that it is hard to tell a story about a lack of something. The truth is that it’s not; lack is where a story’s born. It’s harder I think to keep your eyes on it, to bear witness to a void in life as it sucks everything around it inside, trying desperately to close. Writers often want to fix. They want to tell the story of fixing things—but not here. Ephemera isn’t a repair manual.
It is beautiful, though. Loewinsohn’s figure work is lively, her angles and composition are phenomenal at highlighting the echoes and the emptiness of her youth. When she shifts away from that and into the present, she manages still to conjure the same setting with the magic of earth untouched. Even when the leaves have fallen and the grass is brown, the world of Ephemera feels ripe with potential.
The story, like the embossed leafy décor of the cover, is about new growth. When a garden has overgrown, when its plants have withered, or been taken by weeds, you cannot simply fix them. You have to clear away what is there, what has overtaken. You have to clear the earth in order to plant anew.
I’ve done a lot of clearing, these past couple of years. These past couple of months, I’ve struggled a lot with my writing. I read Ephemera twice in that time. In my first attempt to write about it, I attempted to connect with my own parents, but that was too literal. I’ve told that story myself. I’ve wrung out every bit of it that I can. I think that’s why I couldn’t write about it anymore. My second read, and my second try, were both filtered through the lens of writing itself. What do I do when the way that I’ve written begins to feel as though it has nothing left to offer? Clear the old growth and start anew. It’s good to let things go.
