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Two remarkable books were published recently that deserve the attention of psychoanalysts. Both are about working through the death of parents and cleaning up the mess left behind from an ambivalent relationship. The books could hardly be less alike: one is a graphic memoir by a cartoonist well known for getting laughs from neurotic anxiety, and the other an installment of a monumental six-volume work, whose intellectually sophisticated author has been heralded as a successor to Proust. Yet dissimilar as could be in format and tone, they share in common a commitment to truth, sharp observation, reflections on duty and guilt, and meditations on memory. In both books, memories are represented by stuff, especially the disgusting, discarded stuff that is left behind, and the job of emotional reconciliation is represented concretely by the cleaning up of grime and filth. Both authors are exploring how they have been formed and deformed by their parents. It may seem haphazard to compare them, but I think it is worth considering these two texts together because they are trying out new forms to tell the same basic story: Chast in the young genre of the serious graphic narrative and Knausgaard in an experiment with prose that questions conventions of structure and style. In that they are each self-consciously about finding a form to express and explore the process of psychic change, both books are explicitly about the process of writing and drawing as a method of cure.
Chast and Knausgaard share a diagnosis. Each has been consumed with anxiety since childhood, experienced as an always-present sense of foreboding. Each author undertakes in the memoir to describe a new sense of agency in relation to a bad parent, a process that ultimately transforms the way they are in the world. For both, the task of cleaning up is experienced as an unwelcome duty, but becomes the catalyst for inner change that brings relief and resolution.