Life Sentence

In the style of Israeli cartoonist Asaf Hanuka’s ‘The man who wasn’t there’ (2017), ‘Life Sentence’ is a one-page, four-panel comic in the 'Writing at a Glance' comic series published in TEXT. ‘Life Sentence’ tells the story of a male author writing within a domestic space that undergoes change across, even though the subject matter of his writing does not change. Each panel represents a moment in the author’s family life spanning roughly 15 years, as the author becomes a physically present though mentally absent father to his son and wife. The author remains static, seated at his desk, carrying out his writing practice, while he physically ages along with the changing background situation. Captions indicate his obsession for writing about his own father, while his role as father goes largely unfulfilled, leading to his divorce and an emptying house depicted in the final panel. Initially authored as a response to Virginia Woolf’s writing armchairs and Cyril Connolly’s aphoristic ‘pram in the hall’ as the ‘sombre energy of good art’, ‘Life Sentence’ explores the tensions and ironies between a writer’s familial contexts and the subject matter of the writer’s craft.