Taking an experimental approach — visually, conceptually, thematically — to the well-trod ground that is memoir is no easy task, but weaving that experimentation into the metaphorical “DNA” of the work itself ups the ante considerably, and requires both sure-footed artistic skill as well as a fair amount of confidence in one’s vision form the get-go. As evidence for this assertion, I give you Paula Lawrie’s recently-self-published ‘zine My Geometric Family, a collection of single-page illustrations with accompanying text that bring to life formative experiences from the artist’s youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the added wrinkle of presenting everyone’s heads as a hodge-podge of various geometric (you saw that coming) shapes, thereby imbuing the proceedings with a pretty heavy layer of surrealism that both belies and accentuates their prosaic origins. Don’t ask me how that contradiction works itself out on the page, but it does…