Thompson captures not only his character’s memories but the process of remembering: how present events trigger the past in ways sometimes unexpected. Memories haunt Craig, an experience represented masterfully by the reproduction of the same images in new contexts throughout the book. This blanket does not always protect us, for there are moments when the past is too present to be warded away. (I’m clearly struggling here – how do I express with words what art does to the way I feel, without destroying that very feeling with particularities?) Thompson takes me in and makes me experience the memories, the cold, the internal conflict. “Blankets” is one of its own titular objects – the language and art wrap around me as I read, muting the harshness of the outside. Actually, I finish the novel not really even knowing what to think, or how to think. I will say immediately that Thompson does not give answers to these questions. How do we understand our memories? How can we move on from the past? How do those memories shape who we are? How do we shape ourselves based on the memories we have, especially traumatic ones? But for me, these are all secondary to a theme of processing memory. Much of Craig’s focus is his experience with religion and love, and the conflicts between faith, personal morality, sexuality, desire and responsibility.
Though Craig and Raina start dating at camp, they live far apart and eventually break up. The book begins by exploring Craig’s relationship with his younger brother and then follows different threads of his early life: being raised by extremely religious parents, going to Bible camp and not really fitting in, and falling in love with a girl named Raina. There is no real memory of this that exists for me.Ĭraig Thompson’s graphic memoir “Blankets” traces moments from his childhood through high school.
I can only imagine what it must feel like, that stillness, that quiet, that cold. I am from San Diego and have never experienced what I’ve just described. Yet I say perhaps, because I do not know. You open the window or the door to find that the white stretches everywhere. There is, perhaps, a feeling like no other as the morning greets you with a world of freshly fallen snow.
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