Category: Book Reviews

Categories
Book Reviews

“Back to Blackbrick” by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Cosmo’s grandad is beginning to exhibit the early signs of Alzheimer’s. A team of social workers appear at the house he shares with his grandparents, hoping to test Grandad Kevin’s memory. If he doesn’t pass this memory test, Grandad will be dispatched to a nursing home. Cosmo is particularly close to his grandparents after his brother’s death and his mother’s subsequent move to Australia, leaves him living in their house. Desperate to help, he follows his grandad’s garbled instructions and uses an ancient key to let himself into Blackbrick Abbey. As soon as he steps through the gates, Cosmo is transported back in time. He meets his grandad as a young boy and gets caught up in a 70-year-old adventure, meeting the people who shaped his grandad’s life. As he plunges deeper and deeper into the strange world of Blackbrick, Cosmo continues to take extensive notes on the past, intending to use these notes to help Grandad Kevin pass his memory test. At the risk of giving away too many spoilers, I’ll leave my synopsis there.

Irish writer Sarah Moore Fitzgerald drew from her own experiences of her father’s dementia when crafting this beautiful snapshot of the relationship between a young man and his beloved grandad. The depiction of dementia is both accurate and shot through with moments of genuine humour and humanity. There are some genuine laugh out loud moments here and also a few scenes which moved me to tears. Grandad Kevin is far from being the stereotype often encountered in dementia narratives. And whilst the magical elements in the book bring a touch of whimsy and other worldliness to the story, at no point does Moore Fitzgerald shy away from confronting the harsher realities of watching a loved one journey with dementia. This, at heart, is a realist novel with a subtle element of the fantastical. 

Back to Blackbrick is full of wonderful, well-crafted and memorable characters and the plot kept me gripped from start to finish. I’d thoroughly recommend it for late primary and early high school readers who enjoy funny, adventure-filled novels. It also offers a great opportunity to introduce themes around dementia and begin important conversations on this subject with younger kids.

Back to Blackbrick was published by Orion Children’s Books in 2013 

Categories
Book Reviews

“Aliceheimer’s; Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass” by Dana Walrath

Anthropologist, artist and writer Dana Walrath became a live-in carer for her mother Alice after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis became too much for her to manage alone. Moving her mother from her apartment in New York to the family home in rural Vermont, Walrath used the months they spent together to both record her mother’s dementia journey and forge connections which weren’t previously there. From the start, Walrath is honest about the fact that she is not particularly close to her mother and sees this period of dependency as an opportunity to bond before it is too late. I appreciated the honesty Walrath brought to the stories she tells about her mother and particularly their interactions and conversations. I also loved the humour in this book. It’s quite a gentle, upbeat account of dementia. Alice is placid and compliant throughout her illness. Walrath goes to great pains to show how her mother retained her humanity throughout her journey with dementia. I also really appreciated the way snippets of Alice’s history and the Armenian cultural tradition she belonged to is deftly woven into the narrative.

Aliceheimer’s is an unusual format. Each page contains both a small piece of observational writing and a beautiful artwork which illustrates the sentiment. The art is a mixture of collage and pencil drawing. Each scene depicting Alice is fashioned out of the cut-up pages of a copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Thematically the Carroll text works marvellously as it allows Walrath to explore both the confusing and disorientating elements of her mother’s illness and the fantastical, imaginative scenarios which her dementia frequently pitches her into. I loved the use of collaged texts. It seemed the perfect medium for depicting Alice who, as a lifelong reader, was still enjoying the physical pleasure of holding a book and the comfort of being read to, long after her dementia had significantly impacted her ability to function normally in other areas of her life.

Aliceheimer’s is part of a fascinating series of publications which explore various medical issues through a combination of illustration and writing. The series is called Graphic Medicine and if the other publications are anywhere near as powerful as Aliceheimer’s I’d thoroughly recommend checking them out.

Aliceheimer’s was published by Penn State Press in 2016 

Categories
Book Reviews

Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff

First published in the early 90s and concerned with late 80s America, Michael Ignatieff’s novel Scar Tissueexplores the dementia narrative at a point when much less was known about the illness. In fact the narrator, a 45 year old philosophy professor, does not use the term dementia when describing his mother’s condition. Her official prognosis is early onset senility, though the fact that he is able to describe previous generations of close relatives with similar symptoms would suggest some kind of dementia with a degree of genetic heredity. The specific diagnosis and terminology seems less important than the precise and insightful way Ignatieff goes about describing the unbreakable, and at times seemingly unhealthy bond, between a woman living with, then dying of, complications associated with dementia, and her devoted middle-aged son. Ignatieff’s fiction is so well-crafted and believable I continually had to remind myself that I was reading a work of fiction rather than a memoir.

The plot of Scar Tissue is a familiar one. A woman in her sixties begins to forget, then slowly loses her ability to look after herself. After her husband, and primary carer’s, sudden and unexpected death her sons make the difficult decision to sell the family farm and move her into residential care. It’s well-written but somewhat obvious terrain. However, there were two aspects of Scar Tissue which I found incredibly powerful and unique. Firstly, I appreciated reading an honest and powerfully written exploration of the relationship between a son and mother living with dementia. Whilst still living at home, the mother’s physical and emotional care falls almost entirely to the narrator and I found it quite refreshing to hear a man speak honestly and with tremendous kindness of how he bathes, dresses and feeds his mother, all the time ensuring her dignity remains intact.

The second thing which makes Scar Tissue a unique dementia narrative -especially amongst other similar carer-centric narratives- is the way the mother’s illness and eventual deaths completely upends the narrator’s life. Faced with the possibility of losing his connection with his mother he places every other aspect of his life -career, marriage, family- on hold and becomes almost obsessed with visiting her and caring for her. His marriage falls apart. He loses all sense of satisfaction in his job. Eventually his mental health deteriorates to a point where he no longer sees the point in life. It’s not an easy read, but Scar Tissue is one of the few fictional accounts I’ve come across where loss and grief associated with the dementia experience is explored in a really comprehensive way. As such, I found it a bleak but nonetheless important read. 

Scar Tissue was published by Chatto & Windus in 1993 

Categories
Book Reviews

“Erasure” by Percival Everett

I’m just going to begin by laying my cards on the table. Erasure is an absolutely brilliant novel; one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. It was recommended to me by the novelist Keith Ridgway when I asked for suggestions of novels which explored diversity in dementia narratives. The dementia aspect of the novel is quite slight but still incredibly interesting. It also provides the catalyst for much of the action in the novel. I was particularly drawn to the hybrid form of Erasure. It includes a novel within a novel, a lecture, various fragments and another intriguing plays on linear form. It doesn’t surprise me that this novel won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction in 2002. I’m looking forward to reading more work by Everett now.

The plot of Erasure is an intriguing one. Monk is a black American academic and writer of high brow novels which do nothing commercially. At times he seems to live in the shadow of his grandfather, father and siblings who, on the surface of things, all appear to have been more successful than he is. He also rages against the literary world and its stereotypes of black American culture. He’s particularly frustrated by the popularity of a recent novel which he believes exploits working class black culture, playing to the stereotypes. In rage he writes a short satirical novel in the same vein. He employs a pseudonym and is surprised, then slightly horrified when his ‘piss-take’ novel turns out to be a runaway success, eventually winning the National Book Awards despite his attempts to scupper it in his role as a judge. Morally, Monk wrestles with what he’s done but he also faces a more practical problem. His mother is living with dementia and requires full time residential care. Monk’s high brow books don’t make enough money to support him and his mother’s increasingly complex needs, while the novel he’s so ashamed of can keep them both in relative luxury. Erasure’s a very clever book. It calls into question stereotypes about race, class and the arts world. It’s also very funny in places and incredibly astutely observed.

As a dementia narrative it offers an intriguing picture of an older, black woman, struggling to hold on to her dignity. There’s a really powerful scene in the residential care facility when she no longer recognises her sons and a funny, but also poignant take on night time wandering where the old woman manages to row herself out to the middle of the lake. Erasure also gives a fantastic insight into healthcare provision in the USA. It does not shy away from exploring issues around financial support and class within the context of dementia. Erasure was a refreshing, irreverent and eye-opening look at race and class in modern America. Everett cleverly explores the way dementia intersects with both these issues and many more.

Erasure was published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2003 

Categories
Book Reviews

“An Unravelling” by Elske Rahill

Irish author, Elske Rahill’s second novel is an epic beast. It follows the lives of four generations of women in a large family, over a particularly turbulent period. Molly is the matriarch of the family. She’s in her eighties and very much focused upon helping her granddaughters, Cara and Freya bring up their young children. Molly is the wealthy widow of a famous Irish artist and as her life draws to a close she looks back on her childhood and early marriage and also becomes increasingly concerned with how she’ll provide for her granddaughters and great grandchildren after her death. Molly has a substantial estate and is closer to the younger generation than her own three daughters. When her health fails and Molly begins to develop dementia, issues concerning the will and financial provision threaten to tear the family apart.

Rahill is a beautiful writer. Her prose is rich and full of poetic imagery. An Unravelling is quite a long, slow read but I appreciated the way it took its time to get underneath the characters’ skin, bringing each of the women to life for the reader. Molly, in particular, is incredibly well-written. This is a character living with dementia who has both a past and a meaningful present. She is an essential part of her granddaughters’ lives, full of warmth and wit and humour. Rahill tracks her unravelling with great care. Molly’s language and meandering reminiscences perfectly convey both the dementia experience and an inherent respect for this dignified and forthright character.

I also appreciated the deep dive Rahill takes into the practicalities of dementia care. This is a novel which very much explores the unpleasant world of finances in regards to healthcare provision and inheritance. It’s something I’ve often heard talked about but rarely see reflected in dementia narratives. Molly’s own mental unravelling mirrors the unravelling of her family as they let issues surrounding finances pull them apart. An Unravelling is a book about women within a family unit; the bonds they form and how these bonds are placed under strain. It’s a wonderful, immersive read and another great addition to the canon of Irish dementia narratives. I would highly recommend.

An Unravelling was published by Head of Zeus in 2019 

Categories
Book Reviews

“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” by Walter Mosley

Ptolemy Grey is a true character. He’s ninety-one years old and lives alone in his cluttered apartment in Los Angeles. He’s done an enormous amount of living in his ninety one years. He’s witnessed incredibly violent acts of racism. He’s married twice and lost both his wives though his extended family is so large it’s hard to keep track of who everyone is. He’s accumulated a small fortune in gold coins and cash savings which he keeps hidden in his apartment because Ptolemy Grey does not trust banks. He’s repeatedly threatened by the female drug addict who lives across the parking lot. His grand-nephew Reggie’s just been killed in a drive by shooting. AND he has dementia. There’s so much going in Ptolemy Grey’s life, the dementia is almost an afterthought. Though it’s made his life increasingly difficult. With Reggie dead, he’s not sure who is going to look after him. He can’t remember who to trust. He’s holed up in his tiny apartment where the bathroom no longer works and there’s so much rubbish piled everywhere, he can’t even get to his bed to sleep.

Seventeen year old Robyn meets Ptolemy at Reggie’s funeral. She becomes a kind of surrogate daughter/granddaughter/niece to the old man. She moves into his apartment and very soon has both Ptolemy’s living situation and his life licked into shape. Robyn finds a doctor who’s willing to include Ptolemy in a fictional drug trial. A course of experimental injections takes away his dementia so he’s suddenly able to remember his past and present with vivid clarity. The doctor’s warned him that this recovery is temporary. It will ultimately hasten his death but Ptolemy’s willing to take these odds so he has enough time to settle his affairs and ensure Robyn will be looked after when he dies.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. After so many middleclass, white narratives, it was refreshing to read a dementia novel set within a working class, African American community. It offered me a welcome insight into how dementia and ageing is viewed within this community. The extended family is expected to take responsibility for Ptolemy. It’s striking that this is perhaps the first dementia narrative where residential or external care isn’t mentioned at all. The narrative strand involving the complete return of Ptolemy’s memory is completely unbelievable, (I don’t necessarily mean this as a critique). It’s a plot device which Mosley uses in order to allow Ptolemy a chance to bring some level of catharsis to his family and the people he cares about. It works and reads as credible. As do the more realist descriptions of Ptolemy’s life before he encounters the wonder drugs. I was struck by the early descriptions of the squalor and isolation Ptolemy is living in. It resonated with several of my own experiences of older people living alone beyond the point where they’re fit to look after themselves. 

This is both a great read and a captivating portrayal of the dementia experience. I fell in love with the character of Ptolemy Grey. I could easily have read another two hundred pages or more.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey was published by Riverhead Books in 2010 

Categories
Book Reviews

“The Visiting Hour” by Frank McGuinness

This brand new play by Frank McGuinness is absolutely bang up to date. Set in a residential care facility during the Covid 19 pandemic it explores the impact of Lockdown upon older people and their loved ones. The Visiting Hour takes place over the single hour in a week when a woman is permitted to visit with her elderly father. Tight restrictions are in place and she is not allowed to enter the building and must communicate with her father whilst perched on a window outside his room. At intervals an announcement reminds her not to outstay her welcome. Only one hour is permitted for each visitor. These restrictions serve to disorientate the father who is in the early stages of dementia and already showing signs of confusion. He isn’t too sure who his daughter is, when or where they are. The Covid restrictions thoroughly baffle him. He can’t understand why his daughter is shouting at him through a window or why she can only stay for an hour. For many people who’ve visited a loved one in a nursing home, hospital, residential care facility or even in isolation at home during the Pandemic these scenes will be painfully familiar. It is heartening to see how writers are already beginning to explore how Lockdown restrictions have impacted the elderly and particularly those living with dementia.

Over the course of the hour the father and daughter banter about events from the past. It is unclear whether these incidents have actually happened or are fabricated anecdotes the father likes to recount. The line between real and unreal is blurred throughout. The two protagonists talk and argue, laugh and even sing together, revealing a profound connection and a degree of fondness. In some ways they seem dependent upon each other. Though the daughter is now looking out for her ageing father’s physical and mental wellbeing, the play reveals how in the past he has cared for her. The Visiting Hour is very much a contemporary play; poignant, recognisable and scarily relevant. In a very gentle, subtle way it asks big questions in regards to how isolation and loneliness, particularly during the Pandemic years, will negatively impact upon our older people. It’s also a beautiful and honest portrait of the relationship between a father and his daughter and how this sort of relationship evolves and changes with time.

The Visiting Hour was published by Faber and Faber in 2021.

Categories
Book Reviews

“Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Short Plays” by Samuel Beckett

I’m a little hesitant about adding these short Becket plays to our list of dementia narratives. I doubt that Beckett intended them to be read as an insight into dementia, though his work leaves itself so intriguingly open for interpretation I can’t imagine that he’d be surprised by this particular approach. It’s a long time since I last saw Krapp’s Last Tape performed but as I’ve been reading through dementia novels and plays over the last few months it has frequently come to mind. It is essentially a short play about an old man remembering back over his life. He relistens to tapes he’s recorded of himself at various younger stages and then amends and adapts these memories based upon how he now views the experiences he’s been through. As a metaphor for how memory evolves, fractures and repeats within the mind of a person living with dementia, I think it’s stunningly accurate. The old man’s fleeting awareness of what he’s doing, trawling through these tapes of his former life always reminds me of the Robert Frost poem, “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” and, in particular, the lines, 

What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.

Beckett’s characters with all their physical limitations and constraints seem incredibly familiar when considered in light of how ageing and indeed dementia can impact a person’s physicality.

Having re-read Krapp’s Last Tape, I progressed on to other short plays by Beckett and couldn’t help but see a possible dementia reading in many of these pieces. Memory and age are a frequent theme in Beckett’s work, as is confusion around issues of identity, repetition and the passage of time. To be honest, though these texts don’t claim to be dementia narratives, and I’m not too sure whether they’ve been considered as such before, Beckett’s use of language comes the closest I’ve seen in print text to conveying the sense of both internal confusion and linguistic disruption which occurs during the later stage of dementia. Take this section from That Time, for example: 

When you started not knowing who you were from Adam trying how that would work for a change not knowing who you were from Adam no notion who it was saying what you were saying what you were saying whose skull you were clapped up in whose moan had you the way you were.

I’ve read multiple verbatim transcripts of people living with dementia which sound incredibly similar to this and other sections of Beckett’s plays where phrases are repeated, sentences fractured and narratives disarranged and devolved until they lose their sense. I’m now intrigued. Am off to read some of Beckett’s longer plays to see how they stand up as dementia texts. 

Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Plays was published by Faber and Faber in 2009. 

Categories
Book Reviews

“The Story of Forgetting” by Stefan Merrill Block

The Story of Forgetting is Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel. It is a sprawling work which merges realism and fantastical elements in a story spanning hundreds of years and many generations of the same family. During its best moments the storytelling is beautiful and captivating. At other times the novel feels a little unsure of itself and disjointed. There are so many strands to the narrative it seems unclear what Block is trying to accomplish. 

Three separate storylines are interwoven throughout the novel each of which follows a member of the same family line as they deal with the implications of a rare (fictionalised), version of hereditary early onset Alzheimer’s. We meet Millicent Haggard, an English emigrant who brings the strain of the illness to Texas when she moves to America in the early 19th Century. Abel Haggard, an ageing hermit who is holed up alone on a sprawling Texas after early onset Alzheimer’s has claimed his twin brother. And fifteen year old Seth Waller, Abel’s grandson who is trying to trace the roots of his family’s genetic illness after his mother is diagnosed with early onset. The novel also incorporates a family folk tale  -passed from one generation to the next- about a fictional land called Isidora where people are free of the sorrows of memory.

As a concept The Story of Forgetting is really interesting. I’m a magical realist myself and always drawn to writers who used the fantastical as allegory and metaphor in their work. However, whilst the allegory of Isidora is employed in quite a heavy-handed way throughout this novel, it just never seems to connect properly with the narrative. Clearly Block put a lot of effort into the research for this novel. The notes at the close of the book list his reading and research. I thoroughly respect writers who put the hard work into learning about dementia before they attempt to write about the illness in a fictional context. There’s a lot of pseudo-science woven through the novel and at times I did feel it distracted from the characters and the flow of the story. The characters of Abel and Seth are the parts I enjoyed most here and they felt somewhat overshadowed by both the fantastical elements and the clumsily deployed pseudo-science. I also struggled a little with the language Block used to describe Alzheimer’s. It’s consistently referred to as a familial curse and there’s no attempt to explore the possibility of living well with a dementia diagnosis. Some of the portrayals of people living with dementia feel really accurate but pretty hopeless which sits at odds with the whimsical, fantastical tone of the novel. The Story of Forgetting is a decent first novel with some really interesting ideas which ultimately failed to take off for me.

The Story of Forgetting was published by Faber and Faber in 2008 

Categories
Book Reviews

“This is Paradise” by Will Eaves

I am a massive Will Eaves fan. I love the way Eaves puts a sentence together. I love the kindness at the heart of his writing, the wit, the lyricality, the gentle humour. All my Will Eaves books are heavily underlined. They are full of sentences and thoughts I want to return to and unpick further. This is Paradise is no exception. Published in 2012 it’s a kind of family saga, following the Alldens who live in suburban Bath. We meet them first when their four children are still living at home. The children flutter round the edges of their parents’ oftentimes complex marriage offering the reader insight into their father, Don and their mother, Emily. The family is noisy and chaotic -easily recognisable- but not without its fair share of problems. Don has a philanderer’s eye. Emily, a tendency towards martyring herself.

The novel is a game in two halves. In the second half the four Allden children are grown up, though troubled Clive, is still struggling to sever the links with home. They return to be with their mother in her final days. Emily is dying in a residential care facility. She has dementia and no longer recognises any of her family members. As they spend a few days around her bedside and come together for the funeral service both the cracks and the bonds in the Allden family begin to make their presence known. It is a very familiar story: a family revealing both their best and worst sides when placed under pressure. Eaves captures each small snapshot of Emily’s death with grace and searing honesty.

There are only a few sections of this novel which specifically focus on dementia. However, those that do are particularly well-written and really begin to interrogate issues around residential care. Much is made of the pressure the care staff are under. They’re understaffed, under-supported and under-trained. And yet, Eaves takes great pains to repeatedly show us how kind and compassionate they are in their dealings with both Emily and her grieving family. His portrait of a British care facility with its smells, its sounds and its ever-changing roster of residents is so accurately written I could picture every detail of Emily’s experience. I also felt Eaves does a wonderful job of recording the nuanced reactions of each family member: they all respond differently to Emily’s illness and subsequent death. From her husband who infantilises her and finds a new girlfriend while she’s still alive, to her brother who continually tries to draw attention back to himself, to Clive whose grief is bottomless and Liz, who brings her own nursing experience to the table and is consequently quite pragmatic in the way she deals with her mother’s condition. These are believable portraits of real people reacting within the spectrum of their own emotional capability. As with all of Eaves’ writing, the characterisation is nuanced, realistic and beautifully developed. I could’ve read another 300 pages quite easily.

This is Paradise was published by Picador in 2012