Tag: Family

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Book Reviews

“The Imposter” by Anna Wharton

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a pre-publication proof copy of Anna Wharton’s first novel, The Imposter which is due for release in early 2021. Anna has been a journalist, writer and ghost writer for many, many years and most notably worked alongside Wendy Mitchell on her bestselling memoir about her life with early onset Alzheimer’s, Somebody I Used to Know. It’s easy to see how the time spent working on this amazing non-fiction book impacted Wharton’s first novel. Dementia is a key theme running through The Imposter and the description of both the illness and Grace, who is living with Alzheimer’s are both incredibly accurate and deftly written.

I want to be careful not to give away too many spoilers when describing The Imposter. Suffice to say if you enjoy a well-written thriller with twists and turns and surprises along the way. You’re going to really enjoy this novel. The main protagonist Chloe is an almost reclusive young woman who works as an archivist in a local newspaper by day and spends all her spare time caring for her Nan who has recently been diagnosed with Dementia. Chloe’s life changes really quickly when her Nan’s condition begins to decline so rapidly she’s forced to move the older lady into a residential care facility. As Chloe faces this huge life change she also becomes obsessed with a decades old, missing child case she discovers in the archives at work. Chloe begins to lose touch with her Nan as she becomes more and more entangled in the lives of the missing child’s parents who have never given up hope that their daughter might someday come home.

I’m not going to say too much about the missing child storyline in The Imposter except to say it had me hooked from the start and still on tenterhooks four hundred pages later. Wharton is a brilliant storyteller with a gift for building up tension and introducing believable twists in her plotlines. As a Dementia narrative I also found The Imposter very convincing. It includes so many familiar tropes I’ve come to associate with Alzheimer’s: wandering, confusing times and not recognising family members, forgetting when and what is appropriate to eat. Anyone who’s spent time with a family member or loved one living with Alzheimer’s will recognise both Grace’s behaviour patterns and the ways in which Chloe attempts to protect and reassure her Nan. There’s a scene near the start where Chloe is forced to buy yet another identical electric kettle to replace the ones her Nan has melted on the hob, which I’ve experienced personally with family members who have Dementia. Wharton’s depiction of Chloe is also spot on. Chloe both resents and relies upon the support of the care facility and social worker and Wharton does a wonderful job of capturing her frustration. It’s abundantly clear that Wharton has done a huge amount of research into Dementia and as a result Grace is one of the more believable and accurate of the characters I’ve encountered in my reading so far.

I was also incredibly relieved to find that Dementia has not been reduced now to a plot device in The Imposter. The storyline which explores Grace and Chloe’s relationship runs parallel to the more thriller-like storyline in the novel and exists as a wonderful piece of character development, allowing us to get an insight into who Chloe is and how her relationship with her Nan has developed. I really enjoyed this novel. It was great to see a character with Dementia included in such a well-developed way in a novel which is not primarily about Dementia. I’m looking forward to reading more of Anna Wharton’s work.

The Imposter was published by Mantle Books in 2021 

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Book Reviews

“Frangipani House” by Beryl Gilroy

Frangipani House, Guyana born novelist Beryl Gilroy’s first book is set in her own birthplace. The novel’s title refers to a residential care facility where elderly women are sent to live out their final days. Mama King, the novel’s chief protagonist is forcing to move into the home by a delegation of absent children and grandchildren. She’s quite convinced that she’d be better off managing by herself and goes out of her way to be as obstreperous as possible, frequently clashing heads with the home’s owner and ultimately making a break for freedom, to live on the streets with a rag tag collection of other homeless people who give her the care and kindness she has not experienced from either her family or the people they’ve paid to look after her.

Frangipani House, like many texts of its era, does not use the term dementia, however it’s clear that Mama King is becoming more and more confused as the novel progresses. She frequently forgets where and when she’s living, mixing the past with the present and has conversations with people who aren’t present. She is not as capable of looking after herself as she’d like to think. Mama King also gives us an insight into how the other residents of Frangipani house are treated. Several are much more confused than she is. Including one ninety year old lady who inconveniently passes away, just before her birthday celebrations. The staff decide there’s no point wasting all the party food. They wheel the dead woman out in her chair and tell the other residents she’s just napping so they can continue to celebrate. A number of anecdotes like this reveal how the elderly residents are not treated with the respect and honour they deserve.

Frangipani House is a wonderful exploration of how ageing is perceived within this particular African community. The younger people talk a lot about respecting their elders and yet, when it comes to delivering physical care, they are quick to institutionalize their parents and delegate responsibility. Gilroy also explores the role of the older woman. Mama King has been a mother not only to her own daughters, but also to their children. Her girls, having emigrated to America, send their children home to be raised in Guyana. Gilroy’s novel questions how fair this system is. The children expect their mothers to provide free childcare, but when it comes to caring for these women in their later years, the same children shirk their responsibility. Frangipani House is a slim novel yet it is rich with detail and colour and full of well-placed observations about what it means to be elderly, female and African.

Frangipani House was published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1986 

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Book Reviews

“The Leisure Seeker” by Michael Zadoorian

Ella and John have been together for more than sixty years. Now in their eighties Ella has developed terminal cancer whilst John is living with dementia. Aware that they don’t have all that much time left together they decide to leave their home in the American Midwest and take one last long road trip across America to the California coast. They don’t inform their grown up children of their plan. They sneak away in their 1978 Leisure Seeker RV, (a campervan for those not familiar with the American terminology) and follow a route they’d followed years ago, when their children were much younger. 

John drives, though he’s increasingly confused and occasionally wanders off, sometimes even threatening Ella with violence. Ella organises everything, though she’s often in agony with her illness and becoming progressively more tired as the road trip drags on for days and days. Back at home, their children are frantic, imagining every variation on the worst case scenario. Little do they know. The couple are held up at knife point, suffer a bad fall and, on several occasions, John gets lost leaving Ella panicking and unsure what to do. When Ella phones home to check in with the children, she doesn’t tell them about any of this.

The Leisure Seeker is a strange little novel. It’s very readable, but the tone is quite odd. It’s hard to tell whether the reader’s meant to see this last adventure as a joyous celebration of a life well-lived, or an example of selfishness on Ella’s part. Though she isn’t technically behind the wheel, this is very much her road trip. John does as he’s told throughout the novel. For me this raised real questions about autonomy and freedom. It’s impossible to know whether a man with a cognitive impairment would willingly choose to drive across half of America in a campervan if he understood how dangerous it was. There’s also a strange change of tone at the novel’s close. For two thirds of the book it feels a little like a buddy movie: upbeat, funny, slightly sentimental, and then towards the novel’s end things take a dark turn. I don’t want to give away any plot spoilers but the final scene kind of calls into question the book’s basic premise, that it is possible to live well and fully with dementia. 

Saying all this, for a piece of commercial fiction, the dementia narrative is reasonably accurate and seems to be well-researched. The novel is narrated throughout by Ella so it’s her understanding of her husband’s condition and experience the reader is being presented with. I think this is important to note. From the perspective of dementia, the main questions which The Leisure Seeker left me with were all around autonomy and control. Is it ok that Ella decides everything for John, even if she is married to him?

The Leisure Seeker was published by Harper Collins in 2009

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Book Reviews

“Flight” by Oona Frawley

Irish novelist, Oona Frawley’s debut novel Flight is a beautifully observed portrait of four lives intersecting. It’s set just outside Dublin in 2004 as a referendum on citizenship approaches. Sandrine is a pregnant Zimbabwean women who has left her husband and son at home seeking to better herself and ultimately gain citizenship for them all in Ireland. Sandrine finds herself working as a live-in carer for Tom and Claire, a rich retired couple who have lived in Ireland, America and Vietnam, following Tom’s career as a spice importer. Tom is now living with advanced dementia and their daughter Elizabeth hires Sandrine to look after him and also keep an eye on Claire, who is increasingly confused herself. Tom is soon moved to a residential care facility and passes away soon after. Within a few month’s Claire’s conditioned deteriorates in a similar way and she too passes away in a nursing home.

I really enjoyed reading Flight. The prose is so carefully crafted and evocative. As the perspective moves between the protagonists it’s really easy to imagine the same situation as slightly different when seen through their eyes. It’s very much a novel concerned with the idea of memory. Whilst Elizabeth struggles with how she was brought up, flitting between various countries and various homes, Claire longs for Vietnam and the lifestyle of her younger days. As her memories merge and become confused, her senses frequently take her back to Vietnam. Sandrine is also constantly interrogating her understanding of the past and what it means to belong to a place. Thrown together, the big quiet house the three women inhabit, comes to feel like a kind of dream scape where time and reality are both confused. There’s also a sense that the women are struggling to connect. They all seem to be lonely, though they’re constantly together. They don’t seem to know how to communicate with each other. It’s only when Sandrine has her baby that she and Elizabeth finally connect, bonding as equals over the baby and talking honestly about their lives.

As a dementia narrative, Flight is intriguing. There are very few of the common tropes played upon here. Neither Tom nor Claire is prone to wandering. They don’t seem to forget each other or confuse their daughter for someone else. Their journey with dementia is more of a kind of gentle erasure. They are less and less present as the novel progresses. Both pass away calmly in their sleep as if succumbing to the last stage of what’s been a kind of extended dream.

Flight was published by Tramp Press in 2014 

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Films

Marjorie Prime

Michael Amereyder’s ambitious feature film, Marjorie Prime is based on Jordan Harrison’s play of the same name. In the film Lois Smith plays Marjorie, a role she originally played on stage. Marjorie Prime explores issues around AI and ageing in what could’ve been a really interesting way. Marjorie is an elderly lady living with dementia. Her daughter, (played by Geena Davis), and son-in-law, (played by Tim Robbins), live with her. They also employ a live in carer. The depiction of early dementia is very accurate. Marjorie is confused and occasionally forgetful but still very present and able to interact with her family. Her family have purchased a prime of Marjorie’s late husband Walter, (played by Jon Hamm), to keep the old lady company and ensure her brain is stimulated. The prime is a kind of interactive hologram. It looks exactly like Walter in his forties. It talks to Marjorie, gathering up information and memories so it can gradually become more and more human-like in its interactions with her. 

The idea of the prime is really interesting. As Marjorie’s memory fades the information she’s feeding the prime version of Walter is less and less accurate. Her son-in-law also helps to programme the prime with snippets of information he remembers about their relationship. However, in an attempt to protect Marjorie, he censors all the disturbing memories and creates a past for her which never actually existed. I thought this was a fascinating illustration ofhow loved ones often interact with people living with dementia. As memory fades, there is an opportunity to censor, adjust and enhance the stories which are recalled, thereby shaping the person’s sense of reality and ultimately, themselves.

If Amereyder had further explored this idea with Marjorie and her prime, I think this could have been an excellent film. However, I felt it began to lose the thread a little when Marjorie died and her daughter, acquires a Marjorie prime, then the daughter dies, leaving behind a prime for her husband. The final scene shows the three primes talking, sharing a simple story about the family dog which is now so mis-remembered and adjusted, it bears absolutely no similarity to the original anecdote. I’d like to have seen more of the interaction between Marjorie and her prime and perhaps a little more depth to the direction. It feels quite flat in places, a lot like watching a recording of a play. In adapting the stage version for screen, I think Amereyder could have explored a little more of Marjorie’s background and the reality of her past.

Marjorie Prime was directed by Michael Amereyder and released in the UK in October 2017

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Book Reviews

“May” by Naomi Kruger

Naomi Kruger’s beautifully written debut novel May is a story about how we remember the past, what we choose to hold on to and what must be let go. It centres around May, an elderly women living with dementia in a residential care facility. The novel is structured around a single day in May’s life. May’s own voice is the leitmotif running throughout the novel. After each chapter we hear fragmented snippets of her thoughts which allow us an insight into the confusion and cacophony of different memories and ideas all competing for May’s attention.

The chapters of the novel are narrated by a handful of different people who’ve had an impact on May. We hear from her daughter, Karen, her grandson, Alex, May’s husband, Arthur and Sana, the young female carer who’s grown close to her in the nursing home. Each of them gives us a little more understanding of May’s story and helps us piece together both who she was and who she now is. Kruger also slowly reveals a decades old mystery which May has become more and more obsessed with since her move into the nursing home. The multiple narrative voices work well here. They’re each strong and developed enough to feel like complete stories in their own right. Though they patch together May’s personal story, they also show how each of the characters has been influenced and impacted by their relationship with her. I particularly appreciated this. Often in dementia narratives, it falls to secondary characters to shape and establish the character living with dementia. Here the secondary characters have been just as impacted by encountering May as she is shaped by their testimonies.

May is an exquisitely written novel. The prose is clean but warm. It doesn’t sentimentalize the family’s relationship with May or approach her illness too emotionally. However, the fondness is apparent, particularly in her grandson’s and Sana’s narratives. I loved the humour Kruger brought to the scenes which showcase interactions with the residents of the nursing home. May is also notable for its exploration of the fractured thought processes of someone living with advanced dementia. We are given multiple opportunities to see how May’s thoughts have become confused and distorted. Kruger does a stellar job in translating this confusion into words. 

May was published by Seren Books in 2018 

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Films

The Roads Not Taken

In English director Sally Potter’s most recent feature, The Roads Not Taken, the first discernible words uttered by the main character, are “everything is open.” In a sense this statement, mumbled by Leo, a writer living with Dementia, (perfectly portrayed by Hollywood A-Lister, Javier Bardem), gives the viewer a quick synopsis of the entire film. The screenplay, (also written by Potter), jumps backwards and forwards between three different points in Leo’s life. We see him as a younger man, married to Salma Hayek and mourning the death of their son, in exile from his second marriage, writing alone in Greece and finally as an older man, confused and depleted by the illness, being guided through a single day’s errands around the city in the company of his daughter Molly, (sensitively played by Elle Fanning). Everything is open at the same time in this movie. Time is fluid as Leo’s memory leaps and flits from one period to the next. Potter does a masterful job of capturing the eternal present of living with Dementia where the past can seem just as real and believable as the moment the person is actually living in. I particularly enjoyed the way the movie skipped seamlessly between the various stages of Leo’s life, leaving much unsaid, mumbled or deliberately confusing, so the viewer empathises with the confusion experienced by Leo and his family.

The strongest section of The Roads Not Taken is undoubtedly the strand set in Leo’s present. The relationship between Leo and his daughter Molly -who has taken on much of the carers role- is believable, warm and occasionally heart-breaking. We see Molly’s distress when her father wanders off in the middle of the night. We see her struggle to understand his speech and promise to, “try harder to see it from your point of view. To see what you see.” We see her frustrated when she loses out on a big job because of her responsibilities with her father. We see her irate at the way others treat Leo, speaking over him and patronising him. But what comes across most strongly in Potter’s depiction of their relationship is the way father and daughter continue to find small moments of connection even as the illness forces them apart. There’s a particularly poignant scene in the bathroom at the dentist’s when, having soiled his own trousers, Molly gives her father hers. Even in the midst of humiliation and confusion there are moments when this movie manages to laugh and yet there’s no schmaltzy ending here, no neat conclusion or moment of epiphany. Leo and Molly’s situation is just as complex and difficult at the end of their day together as it was in the opening credits. Neither does Potter attempt to deify Leo or paint Molly as a saint. Both are flawed, occasionally failing characters. This is what makes them believable. 

Bardem is wonderful in this movie. He has a huge presence onscreen and the sheer bulk of his body, though slowed and atrophied by Dementia, refuses to be relegated to the ranks of a shadowy invalid. He is enormously present throughout. The camera often lingers painfully close to his face, exposing every wrinkle and pore. We are forced to look straight and deliberately at Leo as a person, present with his illness. Here, it is impossible to ignore the person living with Dementia. The Roads Not Taken takes an unflinching look at Dementia and our treatment of people living with the illness. To some extent, this unflinching personal gaze makes the viewer feel culpable in the way society has othered, dismissed and ignored the Dementia experience. I don’t think this is any bad thing.

The Roads Not Taken was directed by Sally Potter and released in the UK in September 2020 

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Book Reviews

“The Boiling Point for Jam” by Lynda Tavakoli

The Boiling Point for Jam is Northern Ireland-based poet, Lynda Tavakoli’s debut collection. It covers a wide range of themes including war, personal loss, ageing, the natural world and Tavakoli’s connection to both Fermanagh and Tehran. The poems are both assured and characterised by a lightness of touch which often had me re-reading lines a second and third time as an image or metaphor slowly impacted with devastating effect.

The collection begins with a handful of poems which explore both her mother’s experience of dementia and her memories of her parents. The second poem in the collection, “Dead Dog” shows her mother distinctly unimpressed by a stuffed dog which has been brought in to the residential care unit to amuse the residents living with dementia, 

‘That’s a dead dog,’ you say,

The words raged from that part of you

Still holding and holding on.

It’s shot through with dark humour and Tavakoli’s signature unswerving gaze. Small, deft touches such as the repetition of the line, how you love my coat/and how you love my coat, reveal her ability to not only capture snapshots of her mother’s life with dementia, but also place those moments under an analytical poet’s gaze. There’s both beauty and profundity to be found next to the deep sadness inherent within these poems. Lines like,

this posse of souls,

eyes-eternity filled already,

struck be as both deeply upsetting and also incredibly poignant. Tavakoli tackles her subject with a great deal of respect and a sense of shared humanity. The poems which deal explicitly with her mother’s dementia are interspersed and set beside poems exploring her memories of both her parents, so the reader gets a real sense of the fondness which exists between the poet and her mother and the deep connection they have. When, in “Is This What I Do” she writes,

I say your name, see the reluctant

wakening of your eyes, the disappointment

you had not slept your way to heaven.

You have told me this before.

there is no judgment of her mother’s despair, no sense that they are meeting as anything but equals. It is the way Tavakoli records her mother as suffering, but not diminished as a person, which really struck me as I read these poems. I found them incredibly moving and would gladly have read quite a few more. 

The Boiling Point for Jam was published by Arlen House in 2020 

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Book Reviews

“Minor Monuments” by Ian Maleney

Minor Monuments is a collection of personal essays by Dublin-based writer Ian Maleney. They’re all set around his family’s small farm on the edge of a bog a few miles from the River Shannon. They explore issues around belonging, place, home, memory and nature and weave together Maleney’s personal experience with his musings on literature, art and, most frequently, sound. Maleney uses sound recordings to capture and explore the landscape of his childhood. Interspersed throughout the essays is the story of his grandfather, John Joe’s diagnosis and experience with Alzheimer’s.

“I wanted to listen hard to his final emergence; to capture his life in the last stage of becoming – to record the person still forming even as he began, contrapuntally, to unravel.”

Minor Monuments follows John Joe right through to his death and funeral. As the older man slowly loses his memories and connections to the landscape, Maleney is questioning his own sense of belonging and how he’s come to think of his home. He spends as much time as he can with John Joe, documenting his stories and paying careful attention to how he interacts with the world around him. At several points in the book, I had the sense that I was encountering a kind of teacher/disciple scenario, with Maleney patiently waiting for his grandfather’s lived inheritance to pass on to him.

“A wake like John Joe’s is not just an opportunity to remember these people and their stories, but also a chance to share and build on those memories, to pass them on and to bind them closer to the people who are living out their own stories in the same place.”

The prose is neat and sparse but imbued with warmth. It’s like reading someone’s meandering thoughts as they pick their way through a difficult time. It’s impossible not to imagine the two men -one old, one young- sat together companionably, their very different world experiences stretching between them, their mutual fondness apparent throughout. This is such a gentle book. It’s deeply respectful and extremely attentive, as you might expect from a writer used to recording sound.

I also deeply appreciated the portrayal of a rural, working man with dementia. It’s rare to see this character portrayed in literature and yet I frequently come across older men and women, like John Joe, who develop dementia whilst living in farmhouses and on land that’s been in their family for generations. For these people, a move to residential care can be nothing short of earthshattering. They are intrinsically bound to their land.

I love this book. It was my favourite non-fiction read of 2019 and I’ve pressed it upon many people since then. Maleney writes with honesty and tenderness, always holding his grandfather as an equal. There’s an awful lot of wisdom in both what he writes and how he writes it. These essays are rich with humility.

Minor Monuments was published by Tramp Press in 2019

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Book Reviews

“Grandpa’s Great Escape” by David Walliams

I don’t make a habit of criticising other author’s work. I know how difficult it is to write a novel. I know that the beauty of a book is often in the eye of the beholder and everyone has different tastes. What gives me the right to make a value judgment about a novel? However, every so often, a book comes along which leaves me so riled up I’m afraid I can’t keep from being critical. 

I’ve never read any of David Walliam’s kids’ books before. I knew they were incredibly popular – NUMBER ONE bestsellers, according to the cover- and I also knew many of my friends and colleagues in the kids’ book world had reservations about both Walliam’s work and also the increasing popularity of children’s books written by celebrity authors. I’m not going to wade into that argument, but I do think they are voicing legitimate concerns and, if Grandpa’s Great Escape is similar to the rest of Walliams’ work I’d have to say I have huge issues with his lazy and borderline misogynistic portrayal of women, his lazy, cliched, offensive depictions of BAME characters and the slightly snide and sneery way he writes about working class people. Putting these reservations aside for the moment, however, I will attempt to focus on Walliams’ exploration of dementia in this novel.

Dementia is not mentioned by name in Grandpa’s Great Escape but as the novel begins with the line “one day Grandpa began to forget things,” and Walliams goes on to outline how he’s taken to wandering off at night, confusing the past with the present and does not recognise close family members, it’s fair to say Grandpa has developed dementia. The novel’s plot outlines his adventures with his grandson Jack. Swept up in an extended delusion that he’s still living in the days of WW2 when he served his country as a fighter pilot, Grandpa runs away from home, hides out in a spitfire in the Imperial War Museum, is incarcerated in an old people’s home which he mistakes for a Prisoner of War camp, leads a mass break out from the home and eventually steals a spitfire from the Imperial War Museum which he flies away in. The plot is quite frankly absurd, but it is a children’s book and I’m all for wild flights of fancy in literature aimed at both children and adults. The problem here is the tone. Most of the outlandish events are written with such flippancy that the suspension of disbelief disintegrates instantly. Walliams has often been accused of being diet-Dahl but he lacks Dahl’s ability to believe his own magic. The made up stuff feels made up and I doubt it would make it past the discerning imagination of most eight year olds. It is badly written nonsense.

I’d be annoyed if this was all Walliams was offering his readers, but I think Grandpa’s Great Escape is so much worse than a poorly written piece of children’s literature. It’s attempting to address an important issue; presenting a character with dementia to countless young readers who might well have a grandparent or loved one living with the illness. As such, it’s unforgivable. Grandpa’s dementia is like no dementia I’ve ever encountered in almost fifteen years of working in this area. He can’t remember his family, confuses times and dates, forgets things and yet manages to mastermind elaborate escape plans, fly a spitfire plane, enter into complicated conversations and at all times remain fastidiously and neatly dressed in full army regalia. It’s quite clear from this portrayal that Walliams has done no research at all into how dementia would actually impact an elderly man or what effect the condition might have on his young grandson. Furthermore, the depiction of the residential care facility Grandpa’s moved into is terrifying. He’s drugged, physically abused by carers and isolated from his family. If I were reading this novel, as a young person whose grandpa had dementia, I’d be both terrified by the possibility he might be incarcerated in a Colditz-style care home and also full of the false hope that he might make a miraculous recovery from his illness. 

At best this book is badly written. At worst it’s downright harmful and instils a false narrative about dementia. I wish all those children, (or perhaps parents), who’ve made it a NUMBER ONE bestseller had instead picked up one of the amazing books for kids I’ve previously highlighted on the blog. 

Grandpa’s Great Escape was published by Harper Collins in 2015