"Is this Recovery?": Chronicity and Closure in Graphic Illness Memoir

The essay that follows, "Is this recovery?," was conceived in another era: BCP-before the coronavirus pandemic, though composed under its reign. Under the regime of COVID-19, the idea of recovery as a story and a reality on the ground requires a gravity of which comics may be capable, but not a mere critic. Witnessing from a mediated distance the death of thousands, if not millions of citizens across the globe, makes the project of casting doubt on a form of storytelling that celebrates a cure, a return to health, an unseemly gesture. Writing in dread of falling ill and dying as part of a collective condition is, of course, always a fact of human experience, but not one we tend to keep present in our minds, especially when well. What will it mean to write from a post-recovery time which has not yet arrived? But what if there is no recovery? If we mean by recovery a state safely relegated to a past tense. In the United States, circa 2020, recovery is not only a matter of public health but of the global economy. For both regimes, now intertwined, the concept of a hard stop has been undermined from within: even with the touted virtues of testing and the creation of a vaccine, experts are saying the virus will remain with us. So, if both health and economic life are becoming more distinctly temporary rather than permanent conditions, we might say now, that given our current understanding of the disease, post-pandemic recovery will continue to be unstable, subject to a reprise of viral activity. This might also be to say recovery will be characterized by a pattern of repetition, recurrence, like living with a chronic illness. It further suggests that in deploying, as we irresistibly do, Susan Sontag's famous metaphor about illness, we would do well to focus on the concept of passport as a metonymy for travel, rather than an opposition between the "kingdom of the well" and "the kingdom of the sick." No matter how long we may reside in the one or the other, the potential for movement, for oscillation between the two always exists.1 Once we acknowledge the porosity between states of health and illness, and recognize the health/illness binary as an unstable relation, the concept of recovery itself requires redefinition. What, then, does recovery from ill health look like when we think of it not as a fixed state-the lure of the cure-but as a process that occurs over time and leaves traces? Finally, what kind of a story, to return to the task at hand, would express that instability? What kind of narrative would that generate?2One visible representation is the model that already exists on American television (and we must always remember the national inflection to ideas about and treatment of health and illness): the relentless production of advertisements for drugs that make it possible to live- happily, this is America-with any number of chronic mental and physical conditions. The ads feature individuals enjoying what appears to be a healthy life (lifestyle, actually), thanks to their daily dose of whatever happens to be on offer in one form or another. Oh, and if we can tolerate the drugs' side effects, whose lengthy enumeration accompanies the promised amelioration of suffering. The chronic, then, is already inscribed and funded in BCP time. A narrative familiar to memoir is that of overcoming addiction, recovery as redemption. This classic form, however, depends on a gerund: recovering. © 2021 University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.