In Displacement, Lucy recounts her experience going on a cruise with her aging grandparents who were showing early signs of memory loss.

A man who had previously prided himself on his smarts in a quiet and modest way, was no longer able to think and function for himself and it was heartbreaking to see.Įnter Displacement. My beloved grandfather, husband of Moppy, my Poppy’s, mental acuity was deteriorating rapidly. In the spring of 2015 I was dealing with a lot of life anxiety – I didn’t know what I wanted to really do with my life, having gone back to school for a teaching degree that I wasn’t finding any positions for, and had just been in a serious car accident. Readers will identify with Knisley’s frustration, her fears, her compassion, and her attempts to come to terms with mortality, as she copes with the stress of travel complicated by her grandparents’ frailty.Ĭlick on this graphic to explore the book page on LibraryThing! Reviewĭisplacement was a lot of firsts for me – my first illustrated memoir, my first Lucy Knisley book, my first book “death” book as my friends and coworkers now call them, it was a lot of firsts and arrived at a very important time in my life. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather’s WWII memoir, which is excerpted. (The book’s watercolors evoke the ocean that surrounds them.) In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. In the next installment of her graphic travelogue series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. In her graphic memoirs, New York Times-best selling cartoonist Lucy Knisley paints a warts-and-all portrait of contemporary, twentysomething womanhood, like writer Lena Dunham ( Girls).

Being a few years older than me, it’s been nice to get a Lucy book at the time when I, or my friends, are going through some of life’s major moments and changes.

But however this book came to be in my possession, it started a years long love of Lucy’s books which I have started to treat as a field guide to millennial life.

I don’t entirely remember what led me to pick up Displacement, but it came out around the same time my grandfather was moved to a nursing home and was suffering severe memory loss.

Something New by Lucy Knisley