Leavitt channels her grief over her partner’s medically assisted suicide into diary comics in Something, Not Nothing (Arsenal Pulp, Sept.).

What role did journaling play in your grieving process?

I’m aware that I won’t remember things if I don’t write them down. My overall feeling when my partner died was “I can’t believe this is happening.” Especially around Donimo’s death being an assisted death. Being a situation I didn’t have any points of reference for, it felt important to track. Because if you try to remember later, you’ll try explaining and ordering things as opposed to just letting them be weird and surreal.

During some of your worst moments in the book, you wrote a lot of fragmented questions. What was the choice behind that?

Working on those pages, I was in the early stages of grief. It’s different from where I am now. It’s been four and a half years since Donimo died. Everything was super raw when I was making those comics. I worked instinctively and moved through the panels without much conscious planning. That felt like the only way I could express the strangeness. Like thinking, “Well, we’ve planned that she’s going to die at 2 p.m. on April 21st.” I ran out of words for that. I fragmented text, as that made the most sense to convey what was inside me. I started playing more with abstraction, broken text and poetic approaches. It’s something that I appreciate about comics, that fluidity.

That broken form was what you emotionally needed, at that terribly fraught period?

What was strange was that the actual experience of making the art was joyful. I was grieving, but I was finding a way of making art that was new. That was a concrete thing. Grief is not just sadness.

What’s it like for you to discuss the book now?

I want to be intentional. Donimo chose her death, but she didn’t have any other options. I fully support the right to die, and think everybody should be able to access it. But it’s not pretty. You have to imagine what it’s like to be in a place where dying is better than living. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that.

I want to talk about grief, how we move through it—how we talk about it. But I also want to have conversations about what you can do with comics, how to manipulate and push the comics form, and how to creatively express grief.