Graphic memoir ponders personal, societal ruins
What’s most striking about Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir is the feeling of emptiness it summons in the reader.
“Imagine Wanting Only This” is approached as a memoir, but really it’s a rumination on ruins. Radtke’s debut is part autobiography, part sobering reflection on the temporary nature of life and love, cities and civilizations.
“Imagine” moves swiftly through Radtke’s life thus far, from her childhood in the Midwest to art school in Chicago, then to grad school in Iowa and beyond. Along the way, she travels almost obsessively, searching for something she can’t quite name.
Early on, Radtke and her boyfriend go to Gary, Ind., to see a city devastated by plant closures and industrial decline. “It’s post-apocalyptic, dude,” an art school classmate had promised. Sure enough, they find empty buildings and an abandoned cathedral rotting away.
Radtke keeps mulling over what she has seen: “Since Gary I’d been consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn’t.” She begins to seek out ruins, to “crawl through gutted mining towns and looted industrial buildings, bombedout barracks and contaminated environmental zones … .”
Radtke racks up visits to famous ruins all over the world. In Italy, all the crumbling places are “restored and honored with red ropes and tourists.” We find beauty in ancient ruins, she realizes, but we turn away from the old mining towns and steel mills left to decay in America.
Ancient societies that left behind ruins “were a people nothing like us,” we tell ourselves. “These were a people who did not have what we have now.” But the remains of “these calcifying rust-belt cities,” Radtke notes, are a different story: “We forget that everything will become no longer ours.”
The wreckage stretches to Radtke’s own story.
She becomes engaged to her boyfriend, then leaves him behind: “I was young enough to think there was no such thing as an irreparable choice.”
She ponders her own genetic heart condition, the same condition that killed her uncle: “The heart beats itself to mush,” a cardiologist explains.
She moves to a town in Kentucky and finds it “the loneliest place on earth”: “I never bumped into anyone on the sidewalk, never brushed a shoulder as I passed. I missed the grids of a city life … and wound myself lost on curved and cracking streets.”
Radtke’s illustrations are clean and uncluttered, but a closer look often reveals an unexpected detail. She blends the occasional family photo into her artwork. And still, so many of her frames convey an emptiness, a loneliness — even when they include people.
Radtke now lives in New York, “a city the news tells me might someday soon be underwater,” she writes. “I like to imagine what this will look like.” She sketches out a flooded city, the streets and subways turned into rivers by global warming — the postapocalyptic ruins of a once-powerful city.
By the time New York is underwater, Radtke’s story has washed away the reader’s strength as well, leaving behind an almost cleansing sense of desolation. There’s not much hope for the future — just the heavy knowledge that the present will become the past, that someone will sift through our ruins and wonder who we were.