The graphic novel My Grandma’s Name Is Like Chocolate is a gentle, brave, and subtly layered book about memory,loss, and intimacy. By weaving together fragments of conversations, personal notes in prose and verse with expressive black-and-white illustrations, the author writes an intimate biography of her grandmother: a war orphan, an adopted girl, an adult woman, a television journalist and mother, and finally an old woman living in a nursing home, slowly sinking into dementia. But the grandmother is not the only character in this story. Klasja Habjan also speaks about her own experience, about the entire spectrum of feelings she faces when observing her grandmother. Her art is a kind of response to the anxiety caused by the inevitability of loss, but above all, it is a silent act of presence – an attempt to record the story of a life and of a relationship, with care and love.
This artist’s book took shape during Klasja’s residence at the Maison des auteurs in Angoulême, France.