Remembering What Would Have Been Better to Forget: "Lucy Is Sick" by Roee Rosen

Roee Rosen's new book is by his definition a "children's book for adults," an illustrated diary that unfolds Lucy's illness, created inspired by his personal experiences from recent years. But this is not just a personal journey, but also a social one, and in certain moments even political.

Roee Rosen | Lucy Is Sick, Pardes Publishing, 2024 (in Heb.)

first publication December 30, 2024 (in Heb.)

One can approach "Lucy Is Sick," Roee Rosen's new book, as an illustrated diary, coloring pages with accompanying text, or a children's book for adults (as it's defined on the back cover). It makes sense to stick with the diary definition, because it reflects the autobiographical writing about Rosen's illness, diagnosed in 2019 with multiple myeloma.

The diary writing reflects the fragmentary chronological progression, documentation of several months in a person's life, and clinical description of the disease's course. This is personal text, including clear life details of a man and his family members, his life course. But it's written (mostly) in third person - about Lucy who is sick.

"Lucy never kept a diary, perhaps because of an old enmity toward autobiographical writing, resentment that was once passionate and full of intention, and now was still present there, but without a sense of belonging, a bit like looking from the street at a building you lived in in the East Village years ago."

The choice to write in third person allows great exposure from the writer's side, but also makes non-voyeuristic identification easier on the reader's part. Because the writer is a real and known person, creating Lucy's character allows him to increase the gap between the artist and the character, between the object of creation and the creator. And still, the book is full of questions around this matter.

So he writes about the act of fiction: "Throughout his life, fiction was Lucy's mighty superpower. Fictionality freed the body from the anatomy imprinted in it. [...] With cancer, fictionality became a thin gown, prone to opening embarrassingly, a gown similar to the one you mistakenly put on your body with the strings in front."

Rosen told that the exhibition and book are an incarnation of a project that began immediately after he received the diagnosis of his illness. A hospital in Austria asked him to create work for public space and he preferred to create coloring pages for the benefit of patients. The coloring pages, he said, allow lightness, a playful cover for dealing with a traumatic subject, and they're also committed to staying within the page limitation. Every experience is limited to one page only. Throughout the book "usage instructions" are occasionally woven in, such as: "My coloring suggestion is [...] to leave the page color as it is."

The book has 51 drawings in black outlines that invite coloring. This move was completed grandly in the exhibition at the Midrasha Gallery at Yarkon 19 in Tel Aviv: 18 drawings were enlarged and drawn on the wall by Oriyan Jacoby, and colored freehand by students from the Midrasha. The entire exhibition (including the separate body of work "War Tattoos") was curated by Gilad Melzer, and is displayed until the end of January.

Making Illness Political

The medium of coloring pages perceived as intended for children, and Lucy's character which has a childlike dimension in image and behavior, stand in complete contradiction to the detailed illness description of the adult man who carries it. In this sense the oxymoronic definition "children's book for adults" found on the cover - suits it. The gap is also felt in the exhibition, when the first image appearing in it is a threatening and attractive skull, alongside tables with colored pencils and coloring pages for public use. The contradiction is built-in, intensified, required.

I'll direct attention to two chapters I found particularly activating. The sixth chapter, "Fall," describes the beginning of physical and then mental recognition of the severity of his condition. Lucy needs to work, send Lucy-substitutes (video works) to all the events he can no longer reach, and for this he needs to climb the spiral stairs leading to the studio. He practices ujjayi breathing meant to ease the pain and climbs slowly while focusing on breathing. This works on the way up but fails on the way down: "The body forgot its disability for a moment [...] Lucy collapsed and was smeared on the stairs."

In the drawing, the spiral stairs look like lungs, and the fall on the stairs is complete disintegration of the character, disintegration into liquid, because from this moment it's clear to Lucy that he can no longer climb to his room, to draw - to be himself. Not only does the character disintegrate, but also the hierarchies: the text isn't meant to clarify the illustration, the illustration doesn't interpret the text. Both are equally powerful and allow better understanding of an experience almost impossible to understand by someone who hasn't suffered this exact suffering, both physical and mental.

Another chapter is about "pain concealment for those who don't hurt." Lucy didn't attribute meaning or significance to his pain, certainly not mystical value or "pain as annihilation of his self" as scholars suggested. For him the pain wildly diverted the life experience from its course, but he understands that in this case he's not the main thing, but the others, meaning there's a need to soothe the pain for society's benefit.

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking chapter that also flows into how illnesses and pain are represented in hospitals and popular culture. And also, to pain representation in stories and drawings about martyrs whose entire role is to die in agony.

The chapter continues Rosen's previous research and dealing with the figure of Saint Lucy, and it also has two coloring pages "that intensify the vertigo of body fluids from previous chapters." As he notes, precisely the coloring page that is "erroneous and sabotaging" because the bodies in it aren't closed and orderly, will produce coloring that probably more accurately depicts the experience of pain - flowing, renal, continuous and amorphous.

"Large parts of this book are testimony to forgetting fateful things," he writes, and that's exactly the point. No person wants to get sick like this, to hurt like this, but when fate was drawn, he writes a diary to remember what would have been better to forget, everything that isn't ordinary routine. Added to this is the (late) recognition that the illness and its treatment are trauma, and therefore erasure from memory is an act of the soul or perhaps of the body. Therefore, there's supreme importance to memory and processing.

Two elements (at least) help turn the book into something bigger than the personal story. The first is thoughts that connect clinical data to philosophy. For example, what is the meaning for the spirit, for the mind, after knowing that 40% of Lucy's brain cells are cancerous? Does he become a minority in his own body? And what's the connection between the medical term counts (blood count) and this Kabbalistic term?

The second is making illness political, through intellectual, social and economic connections. He mentions texts he read dealing with illness and its meanings (Susan Sontag, Anne Boyer, Thomas Mann and others), he compares his condition to patients in the United States and to the situation of the statusless in Israel, mentions the interests of pharma companies to generate profits at patients' expense.

Besides all this, the book is also positioned in time, because it also has touches of a world under corona. Comparison between corona isolation and isolation after bone marrow transplant, and the understanding that he was actually "prepared from childhood for isolation." The relationship to isolation is double, as prison but also as a protective and enveloping bubble whose exit from it is emergency (fire) or miraculous (with healing).

The book's end, the good ending, is characterized by return to drawings full of details, chaotic. They're not exactly optimistic but certainly much more full of movement than before. The movement of the drawings also returns in words; the person returns to his movements, his life, his actions. The incarnation - return to human form - has been completed.