Not in the Pink

Mixed media artist Martel’s illustrated memoir documents her experience and subsequent treatment of stage 2 breast cancer. The heavily designed pages collage brief paragraphs of text with paintings, drawings, photographs, and other digitally assembled and manipulated images. The narrative focuses almost exclusively on the medical experience, beginning with diagnosis and ending with checkups. While the artist’s backstory (her work as a teaching artist, her relationship with her husband) occasionally enters the narrative, the text occupies itself squarely with surgery, chemotherapy, side effects, and the frustrations of the Canadian medical system. Martel’s regular cynicism and preference for honesty over optimism provide a few refreshingly raw moments, although not enough to distinguish this from the many available memoirs documenting cancer and the narrative of treatment. Similarly, the images of fractured bodies, pink bears, and the like rarely contribute to the content, and at times seem more like background noise than essential information or style. While Martel’s work strives for honesty, it falls short of the insight and complexity that similar memoirs deliver, and the whole of its assembled text and images fails to add up to anything greater than those individual parts. [em](BookLife) [/em]