ANC073: Self-Portrait of the Artist Stupid with Grief by Franziska Hofhansel
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you weren’t perfect, maybe, but you toed the line, you respected limits. and then one day you woke up and the line wasn’t where it had once been.
Researchers have disproved the concept of an orderly grieving process with discrete stages and certain trajectories. The bereaved mourn in different ways and at varying speeds based on inherent traits and the nature of their loss, but not without an added element of unpredictability. Further complicating matters are bonds marked by ambiguity. Death may only serve as the final step for a broken relationship in which the person in question has been physically or mentally absent prior to their passing. Survivors are left to contemplate what exactly they have lost, and when.
In the experimental fiction Self-Portrait of the Artist Stupid with Grief, a young woman ruminates on the disappearance of her parents—her father to suicide long after her mother’s abandonment. Franziska Hofhansel’s protagonist examines her connections to both by reconsidering a series of photographs and drawings created throughout their years together and apart. These images remain just out of focus, leaving the reader to understand them only through the narrator’s monologues. Memories unspool to illustrate formative experiences shaped by her family’s eccentricities, as well as the banal cruelty of capitalism influencing her life today. Reflecting on these struggles, she finds "...we could not endure it, not for a single second could we endure the true story of our own lives, of anyone’s life. only just this once i would like to try."
For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.
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