The Last Time We Spoke: A Story of Loss

“The last time we spoke, I was 14 and terrified,” writes journalist and artist Mechanic at the outset of his deeply moving and visually innovative debut about his mother’s death, at age 49, of cancer. Afterward, Jesse’s grief unleashes a torrent of mental struggles, the cruelest of which are intrusive thoughts that tell him, “You wanted her to die. Be honest.... You’re happy, overjoyed even.” His OCD is a “stone-hearted internal bully,” represented by a giant rendered in scribbled lines. The narrative employs spacious, architectural, and often cannily symmetrical illustrations to depict his “cascading” psychological landscape. After feeling nearly suicidal, he discovers punk and hip-hop and “storytelling and pain” in music that helps him escape the torments of his own mind. Looking back now that he’s a parent himself, Mechanic realizes how hard it must have been for his mom to leave her family unwillingly and too soon. The way he currently lives—urgently, artistically—is, he writes in tribute to his mother, “because of all the things you taught me while you were here, and what your absence has taught me as well.” Such reflections will ring painfully familiar to anyone who has stumbled around in the darkness of grief. This vulnerable graphic memoir cuts deep. (Sept.)