The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief

NPR’s Books We Love 2025

LA Times Book Prize for Graphic Novels/Comics 2025 FINALIST

During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too-real, she explored previously uncharted emotional territory for herself and others, in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich.

An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler’s comics-making career, The Ephemerata features Tyler’s most breathtaking picture making ever — fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional color washes or highlights — and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways — in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text — she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance. Tyler’s memoirist skills also rise to the fore, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep and beautiful book takes a true artist.