Tag: Family

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Book Reviews

“The Waverley Gallery” by Kenneth Lonergan

In Kenneth Lonergan witty, poignant and surprisingly funny New York play, The Waverley Gallery, the action centres around feisty 80-something, Gladys. Gladys is an old-school lefty, a lifelong social activist and vibrant member of the Village scene and the owner of the Waverley Art Gallery mentioned in the play’s the title. Gladys is already exhibiting symptoms of Dementia when the first scene begins. The Gallery, though hardly lucrative anymore, gives her a routine and purpose to her days. When the landlord decides to turn the property into an extension of his hotel, Gladys’ condition rapidly deteriorates. A small cast of characters exist as Gladys’ carers and community: her grandson who lives in the same apartment block, her daughter and her daughter’s husband and the artist who will become the last person to have an exhibition in Gladys’ gallery.

The Waverley Gallery is quite a simply structured play. The scenes move between the gallery, Gladys’ apartment and her daughter’s house where the family gather for a weekly dinner and catch up. The simplicity of the structure allows Lonergan to focus on the interactions between characters. The dialogue is absolutely superb. Lonergan’s managed to perfectly capture the repetitive retellings of a person in the first throes of memory loss- we get the same set phrases, anecdotes and questions from Gladys at every single family dinner. Lonergan also has an incredible ear for how families communicate, talking over each other and at cross purposes, blending wit and humour in with fond mockery. Having sat through so many dinners with various family members exhibiting the first signs of Dementia, I can honestly say I’ve never seen this kind of dialogue written with so much accuracy and warmth.

Lonergan also gives time to the family members who have, by default, become Gladys’ carers. He notes their fondness for the old lady alongside their frustration with the situation and occasionally with Gladys herself. Gladys is also a powerful and dominant voice in the play. Despite her confusion she stunningly articulates her own frustration at how the final years of her life are playing out. She speaks poignantly about the loss of her independence and the plans she’d had for later life. The Time Out review called The Waverley Gallery“attractively modest,” and I believe this to be a fitting accolade for the play. Lonergan isn’t attempting anything revolutionary with this script. It’s simple but it’s also incredibly well-executed. The interplay between characters is so beautifully developed and accurate it does not require any further embellishment.

The Waverley Gallery was published by Grove Press. in 2000.

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Book Reviews

“The Things We Keep” by Sally Hepworth

For some reason the vast majority of novels and short stories which address the subject of Dementia seem to be focused upon the experience of elderly white women. There are some notable exceptions. However, there is a definite lack of diversity in fictionalised writing about Dementia. As such Sally Hepworth’s The Things We Keep reads like a real breath of fresh air. It focuses upon a young forty year old woman named Anna, who develops early onset hereditary Alzheimer’s and decides to leave her marriage and check herself into a residential care facility so she won’t become a burden on her family. 

Rosalind House is much like every other care facility; the majority of the residents are quite elderly. However, Anna soon befriends Luke, another young resident who is also living with early onset Dementia. The two begin a relationship which quickly becomes sexual and subsequently discover that living with Dementia has removed much of their autonomy. They are no longer allowed to make decisions about their relationship or their bodies. Anna’s brother, concerned about her welfare, insists upon keeping them separate and the care staff are forced to comply with his wishes. This decision soon begins to have a major impact on Anna’s mental and physical health. 

Although The Things We Keep isn’t the kind of novel I would normally read, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s well-written, funny and touching, moving backwards and forwards in time and employing three first person narrators -Anna, Eve (the resident cook), and Eve’s young daughter, Clementine- to help us piece together the events which have led up to Anna’s incarceration in her own room and the depression she’s suffering from. The style might be light and zippy but the themes explored in this novel are incredibly complex and hard-hitting. It asks huge questions about whether people living with Dementia are capable of loving and being part of healthy relationships.

“But even if they loved each other once, they can’t really love each other now, can they? How can you love someone you don’t remember?”

It wrestles with questions around power of attorney and who gets to decide what’s in the best interests of a person living with Dementia. It addresses issues of autonomy and the lack of autonomy often experienced by people living with Dementia. It explores the thorny subject of sexual consent and takes an honest, unflinching look at the depression and mental health issues associated with Dementia. It also does an amazing job of exploring the disparate responses to a Dementia diagnosis with Luke and Anna both reacting to their illness in very different ways.

It’s wonderful and really refreshing to see all these important questions addressed in such an open, natural way although I will say the final chapter of the book felt a little too neat and resolved for me. I’d have preferred a more complex, incomplete and, arguably more believable, ending to Anna’s story. If this had been a literary fiction novel, rather than commercial fiction I think it might have ended in a more inconclusive fashion. There’s a sense here that even though Anna’s story is far from a fairy tale she’s still being offered a version of the happily ever after ending which I don’t think would actually happen under these circumstances. The Things We Keep is still a great read though, and a welcome addition to the canon of Dementia fiction, adding a much need dose of diversity.

The Things We Keep was published by Pan Books in 2016 

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Book Reviews

“The ACB With Honora Lee” by Kate De Goldi

with illustrations by Gregory O’Brien

I absolutely adored The ACB with Honora Lee. It grabbed me the moment I opened it. I’m always on the look out for books which help children and young adults to understand what it’s like living with Dementia and I could instantly see how this book would appeal to mid-Primary aged children and help them process some difficult issues. Gregory O’Brien’s gorgeous illustrations explode across the inside cover and continue throughout, bringing main character, Perry’s thoughts to life in what look to be a series of colourful mind maps. I particularly enjoyed the way the story and illustrations bring different perspectives to the forefront and yet also compliment each other superbly in this short novel.

Perry is an only child with a very inquisitive outlook. Her favourite word seems to be why. She’s trying to figure out the world around her by constantly bombarding the adults in her life with questions. Sometimes she gets the answers she’s after. Often, she feels as if she’s being fobbed off. Perry has a wonderful relationship with her gran, Honora. She’s been Perry’s go to person but now she lives in a retirement home called Santa Lucia. Perry still visits regularly, accompanied by her parents or more frequently, her childminder Nina and Nina’s son Claude. They not only spend time with Honora but form a kind of community with the other residents.

Within a few chapters it is clear that Perry’s gran isn’t the same as she used to be. Gran is confused and sometimes doesn’t even recognise Perry. Perry finds this a bit distressing but instead of abandoning her trips to Santa Lucia, she tries to find a new way for them to connect. She begins to work with her gran on a school project, compiling a quirky and sometimes confused ABC of the older woman’s life. Through the ACB (as Honora calls it), and time spent together, Perry comes to understand a little more of the illness her gran is living with and finds new ways to bond with her as she now is.

The strength of The ACB with Honora Lee is to be found in the way Kate De Gold allows us to see Dementia through the eyes of a young child. Perry describes and explains things in her own childlike way and I found the tone she takes incredibly reassuring.

“So far, all Perry knew about Gran was her name – Honora Lee- and her age – seventy-six years old – and that she didn’t have a husband or much memory any more, which was why she lived at Santa Lucia and could never get Perry’s father’s name right.”

The book is an excellent resource for children who are learning how to live with a loved one who has Dementia. The tone is upbeat, fun and full of little quirks and yet the book doesn’t shy away from some of the harsher realities of living with Dementia. There are plenty of opportunities presented by the story for talking about the sad and difficult changes Dementia can bring about. However, the message comes across loud and clear in both the written text and the illustrations. A special friend or loved one living with Dementia is still the same special friend or loved one. There are ways in which to continue enjoying your time with them and, if you’re anything like Perry, you might even learn something in the process.

The ACB with Honora Lee was published by Hot Key Books in August 2015 

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Book Reviews

Elizabeth is Missing– Emma Healey

Debut author Emma Healey won the Costa Book Awards in 2014 for Elizabeth is Missing, a clever and gripping novel about a woman who is trying to solve a decades old crime whilst living with Dementia. The novel is narrated by Maud, an elderly lady who is increasingly confused about both the world around her and important events from her past. Maud’s good friend Elizabeth hasn’t come to visit in quite some time and Maud is becoming extremely worried about her. She pesters the GP and repeatedly phones Elizabeth’s son in the middle of the night. She drives her own daughter Helen crazy with constant questions about Elizabeth. Maud’s distress is amplified by the fact that Dementia is blurring the line between past and present. Elizabeth’s disappearance has become muddled in her mind with the disappearance of her older sister Sukey, seventy years previously. Memories of the two women blend and intertwine inside Elizabeth’s head.

“Perhaps I should put a note through Elizabeth’s door. Just to say I’ve been. Just to say I was looking for her, in case she comes back. Dad did that for Sukey.”

Maud is the ultimate unreliable narrator. She can no longer hold her own train of thought and this makes it difficult for the reader to keep track of her investigations as she takes notes, searches for clues and tries to follow leads, hoping to find out what’s happened to Elizabeth and, by default, Sukey. It’s difficult to process which pieces of information offered by Maud are true and which red herrings, or misinterpretations. We’re not sure which case is real and which a figment of Maud’s imagination. Though possessed by the notion that she’s on some kind of urgent quest -a common occurrence in people living with Dementia- at times Maud doesn’t know what she’s trying to accomplish herself.

“Even if I knew what I wanted, how could I ever find it? ‘I’m looking for something,’ I say to the man, ‘I just can’t recall, you know.”

Whilst I have some reservations about the use of Dementia as a narrative device -here, as a vehicle for solving a mystery- and I think the novel’s conclusion is a little too neat, Elizabeth is Missing is still an interesting glimpse into the experience of a person living with Dementia. It’s rare to find a first person narrator with Dementia employed throughout the entirety of the book and the range and scope of Maud’s experience -thoughts, memories, interpretations and dialogue- offers a really comprehensive snapshot of both what it’s like to live with Dementia and the resulting confusion, and how other people react to the condition. For me, the standout moments in the novel are those sections where Maud gives the reader insight into how she’s treated and viewed by her family, healthcare professionals and the other people she comes across. These sections read as extremely realistic and quite illuminating. Elizabeth is Missing is also an infinitely readable novel with a clever, well-structured plot and Maud is a genuinely likable and complex protagonist who I enjoyed spending time with.

Elizabeth is Missing was published by Viking in 2014

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“Summerwater” by Sarah Moss

Summerwater is English writer, Sarah Moss’s seventh novel and occupies familiar territory. Moss writes particularly eloquently about the complicated and often fractured relationships which make up the nuclear family. In Summerwater her gaze falls upon a handful of different families who have chosen to spend -what appears to be the wettest summer ever- in a chalet park in the Scottish Highlands. There’s nothing much to do and little means of escape with the rain pouring down incessantly. Trapped inside their tiny chalets, the characters in Moss’s novel begin to interrogate their own family dynamics and closely observe how the other families are navigating this same bleak experience. 

Set across the course of a single day which ends tragically around midnight, each chapter in Summerwater explores a different character’s point of view through a close third person narration. As with all of Sarah Moss’s writing this is a tightly observed and incredibly effective and affecting piece of writing. Moss excels when she explores what it means to be human in community and the dreadful isolation which can still be felt within a family unit. Her writing is shot through with little vignettes of family life which are oh so familiar, and rendered with warmth, wit and dignity. (I especially loved her description of Justine attempt to wrestle her way into a sports bra and almost dislocating her shoulder in the process).

Early in the novel we meet David, a retired doctor who is holidaying in his privately-owned chalet with his wife, Mary. From David’s narrative we begin to piece together that Mary is most likely displaying the early symptoms of dementia whilst David is doing his best to set his professional judgment aside and convince himself there is nothing wrong with her. Later in the novel, Mary gets a chapter to herself. The way she thinks about and articulates her growing confusion is a particularly interesting example of a character whose inner life is at odds with the outer image she’s attempting to portray. Mary has just become aware of her condition. She is beginning to misplace nouns and confuse old memories. Though willing to acknowledge that something’s wrong, she is just as reluctant as her husband to take steps towards dealing with the problem.

“You mind your own business, she wants to say, but she says, oh, just going through my bag, it’s getting a bit heavy. Looking for the thing. Looking for the word for the thing. He’d only worry, or take her off to the doctor, and they can’t do anything, can they, about -well, about this kind of thing. If that’s what it is.”

Like all the characters in Summerwater, David and Marys’ story highlights a fundamental failure in communication. None of these characters are being honest with each other. In David and Mary’s case, they’re not even being honest with themselves. And if language and conversation are already failing this couple so early in their experience of Dementia, it does not bode well for their future together. Whilst the section which engages with Dementia only occupies about a fifth of Summerwater it’s still an essential compelling read, which manages to capture in 200 short pages, the essence of human disconnection. Tellingly, Mary’s chapter in the novel, ends with these stark, but poignant lines.

“He is still looking at her.

She does not look back.”

Summerwater was published by Picador in August 2020

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“Rain Birds” by Harriet McKnight

Australian writer, Harriet McKnight’s debut novel, Rain Birds is set in rural Australia, on the edge of the wild and beautiful Murrungowar National Park. McKnight has a wonderful ability to capture the natural world in her writing and I particularly enjoyed the way this novel interweaves the personal experience of how dementia impacts a couple’s relationship, with themes of global and environmental responsibility. It’s pretty obvious from the outset that McKnight knows and understands the world she is writing about.

Alan and Pina have spent thirty years living together in isolated Boney Point, when Alan begins to develop early-onset Alzheimer’s. Pina feels as if she’s losing contact with her partner as he starts to forget things, lose his language capability and disappear into his own head. Then the arrival of a flock of rare, black cockatoos offers them a means of connecting, both to each other and the moment they’re currently living through. Conservation biologist, Arianna, is also obsessed with the black cockatoos. She’s trying to encourage them back to their natural breeding site before the flock dies out. Pina wants the birds to stay in her backyard where Alan can get the comfort and benefit of seeing them every day. Both women bring their own agenda to the issue of the cockatoos. Neither is being deliberately selfish but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to their problem. Either Alan will suffer or the birds will ultimately be put at risk. McKnight uses this small, and very localised dilemma, to highlight much bigger environmental issues. 

Rain Birds is essentially Pina’s story. She’s struggling to come to terms with Alan’s Alzheimer’s, (“I have to stop thinking of him as if he’s already dead,”) and fixates on the black cockatoos as a means of preserving some degree of connection with him. As the novel progresses, she becomes more and more irrational about the birds, losing perspective as she tries to hold on to the one aspect of her life with Alan which she can actually control. 

The novel includes some incredibly honest and very recognisable insights into what it’s like to live with a partner who’s developed Dementia,

“How she followed him around in circles, shutting drawers, finding his jacket in with the crockery, the milk left under the sink with the cleaning stuff, directing him to the bathroom when he couldn’t find it, the tantrums, the anger, the forgetting, always the forgetting. The way it could all turn a woman slowly insane.”

McKnight effectively uses the cockatoo situation as an extended metaphor for all Pina’s frustrations and disappointment. In the specific and personal she finds grounds to explore big universal themes of anger, control and loss. Rain Bird’s a wonderful novel, beautifully written and full of rich descriptions of the natural world. It’s one of the first accounts of Dementia and environmental issues I’ve come across. I sincerely hope to read more. 

Rain Birds was published by Black Inc in 2017 

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A Trilogy of Wonderful Grandpa-themed Picture Books

These three stunning picture books aimed at young readers provide ample opportunity to begin conversations with small children about how what it’s like to watch someone they love grow older. All three explore various forms of ageing, including forgetfulness and the loss of memory. Whilst they don’t explicitly mention Dementia, the implication is there, and the topic is covered in a range of really sensitive age-appropriate ways. The beautiful illustrations enhance the impact of these books and also offer different opportunities to ask questions and begin discussions with young readers, exploring their own experiences of ageing in a safe and enjoyable way.

Grandpa Green – Lane Smith

Grandpa Green is an amazing gardener. In this beautifully illustrated book, his great-grandson leads us around his garden which is populated by all sorts of amazing topiary sculptures: animals, people and even an enormous wedding cake. Grandpa Green is getting old and he sometimes struggles to remember all the amazing things that have happened to him. But it’s ok, because “the gardens remembers for him” and he has a fantastic great-grandson who likes nothing more than to tell Grandpa’s story using all his imaginatively-shaped plants.

Grandpa Green was published by Two Hoots in 2017

My Great Grandpa – Martin Waddell

With illustrations by Dom Mansell

Gran might say “it’s sad to be like Great Grandpa is now!” but his little great granddaughter knows it’s not. She takes her Great Grandpa out on a wonderful adventure around the village he lives in. Great Grandpa tells her all the history he can remember and when his memory runs out, she fills in the rest of the details. Together they make a fantastic team. She doesn’t feel at all sorry for her Great Grandpa though she can see he doesn’t have as much energy as he used to have and sometimes he seems a bit muddled. She’s sure, “Great Grandpa knows things that no one else knows. In his mind he goes places that no one else goes.”

My Great Grandpa was published by Walker Books in 1990

Granpa – John Burningham

A little girl and her grandfather share a very special relationship. Though Granpa’s not as strong as he used to be and sometimes he can’t go out to play, through gorgeous leading questions and beautifully illustrated pictures of the fantastical worlds he conjures up we can see his imagination’s still working well. Granpa might be exhibiting the signs of early Dementia or he might just be playing make believe with his little granddaughter. Burningham doesn’t feel the need to make this explicit and this decision serves the story well. Granpa is a subtle and very clever book which illustrates the way a child’s ability to enter into her grandfather’s confusion about reality could actually help her cope with his Dementia in a loving and imaginative way.

Granpa was published by Puffin Books in 1984

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“Burnt Sugar” by Avni Doshi

Burnt Sugar is Avni Doshi’s debut novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Set in Pune, India it is narrated by an artist named Antara who is struggling to come to terms with her past as she tries to work out how to care for her mother, who is living with early onset Dementia. This is a painfully honest look at caring for a close family member who isn’t particularly likeable.

“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”

Tara has not been a particularly caring mother. Abandoning her loveless marriage, she brought young Tara up in a strange and sometimes frightening ashram, then briefly chose homelessness for the two of them just to spite her affluent parents. Antara has been dragged along on this crazy adventure, for the most part, reluctantly. Now, a fully grown adult and about to become a mother herself, Antara is thinking about her past and some of the bad decisions her mother has made. Unfortunately, Tara doesn’t remember their shared past in the same way. Both women feel the other is culpable for the mess they’ve made of their relationship. But with Tara’s increasing confusion, it’s almost impossible to know who’s telling the truth.

“It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done. It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time.”

Antara resents the way her mother has brought her up and yet feels compelled to care for her as the Dementia renders her increasingly reliant on others. Tara doesn’t make the process of reconciliation easy. She constantly contradicts her daughter’s take on events and eventually sets fire to her studio, destroying all her artwork. Antara interprets this act as an attempt to erase her identity.

The novel wrestles with complex questions about matriarchal relationships: these women can’t seem to exist without the other, yet also appear to be hell bent on destroying each other. Their narratives are in conflict, yet they also seem to have shaped each other’s stories and their own particular ideas of truth.

“Sometimes I think I am becoming my mother.”

“Reality is something that is co-authored.”

Burnt Sugar also explores the role of women within Indian culture, interrogating class and gender assumptions and how both have evolved over the span of Tara’s lifetime yet still have a long way to go. The novel is rich in cultural description and paints a powerful picture of how Dementia is viewed within a non-Western culture. I particularly enjoyed the scenes describing everyday domestic life and the culture which exists around food. It’s refreshing to read a depiction of someone living with Dementia who isn’t an elderly, white, middle-class woman. I’d like to read more narratives like this. I thoroughly enjoyed Burnt Sugar and found the character of Tara both intriguing and extremely frustrating. I can understand Antara’s reluctance to become her mother’s fulltime carer. A trying person who develops Dementia is usually just as trying as before their diagnosis, oftentimes more so.

Burnt Sugar was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2020

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“The Father” by Florian Zeller

Translated from the French by Christopher Hampton

With a big screen adaptation forthcoming later in 2020/early 2021 I thought I’d revisit French novelist and playwright, Florian Zeller’s incredible play Le Père, (or in English, The Father). Zeller makes bold, creative decisions with this play which explores the Dementia experience of an older Frenchman named André. André becomes the lens through which we see the world. The characters, dialogue, time frame and set of the play are all deliberately ambiguous as Zeller attempts to capture the confusion of André’s experience on stage.

The play itself is set in what André takes to be his Parisian apartment, although it is also at times his daughter’s apartment. Zeller’s stage instructions convey the confused nature of this space.

“Simultaneously the same room and a different room. Some furniture has disappeared: as the scenes proceed, the set sheds certain element, until it becomes an empty, neutral space.”

Scenes repeat with slight variations, additions and subtractions to the dialogue. This makes it incredibly difficult to follow any linear time pattern through the play. The audience is catapulted into André’s world where time means very little anymore. The past is the present is the past and memories repeatedly come back to haunt him, whilst other details, like the death of his younger daughter, seem to be permanently misplaced. Most worryingly of all Zeller employs different actors to play André’s daughter and her partner so when he does not recognise Anne or Pierre, the audience understands his confusion because we do not recognise them either. These people might be speaking Anne and Pierre’s lines, but they no longer look anything like them.

The Father is a simple and yet hugely ambitious attempt at embodying the Dementia experience in a piece of art and allowing it to be accessible to the audience members as they watch the play. It incites a feeling of confusion, disorientation and frustration not unlike Dementia itself. However, it is also shot through with moments of heartfelt emotion and beautiful, poignant language such as the section towards the end of the play, when André, greatly diminished by his illness and the confusing experiences he’s been through, likens himself to an Autumnal tree.

“I feel as if… I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves, one after another.”

I’m so looking forward to seeing Florian Zeller’s own film adaptation of The Father later in the year and am confident that the all star cast including Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman and Rufus Sewell will do justice to this powerful play.

The Father was published by Faber and Faber in 2015.

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“Goodbye, Vitamin” by Rachel Khong

There are a number of reasons why I really enjoyed the American writer, Rachel Khong’s debut novel. For one thing it’s very funny. It tackles a relatively serious subject with gravity where gravity’s required and also buckets of humour and wit. Sometimes the humour and pathos are mixed together, as in the following exchange between Ruth and her father, whose Alzheimer’s is beginning to make him confused.

“I’m your daughter,” I say.

“You sound different,” he says.

“How?” I say.

“More sonorous,” is what he says.

Khong isn’t afraid to laugh in the midst of the saddest moments. There’s something very familiar about this as the absurdity of living with Dementia often means experiencing the whole spectrum of emotions simultaneously. The other thing I particularly enjoyed about Goodbye, Vitamin is the portrayal of a person who is attempting to maintain a normal existence even as their Alzheimer’s takes hold. For many people there is a period after diagnosis when they continue to work and live as closely as possible to their normal routine. This is rarely depicted in films or books. Ruth’s father, a much-loved history professor, doesn’t want to stop teaching even though his boss and colleagues have noticed his behaviour’s becoming erratic and have asked him to step down from his teaching role. What follows is an elaborate plan whereby Ruth, conspiring with his students, set up sessions off campus so her father can continue to teach the classes he loves.

“The idea Theo and I plant into Dad’s head is that because we’re learning about the Los Angeles Aqueduct, we should take an educational field trip to go visit it.”

Ruth herself is the narrator of the novel. Her story is recounted in chronological diary excerpts where readers are presented with a snapshot of her personal life alongside her attempts to care for and connect with her dad. Ruth isn’t having an easy time of it. She’s thirty years old, recently single and back home living with her parents. She’s frustrated that there isn’t a miracle cure for either her dad’s condition or the mess she’s made of her life. In the absence of medical remedies she begins to learn that love and being gentle with each other is the best way to navigate this turbulent time. Ruth seems to find it easiest to make sense of the journey her father is taking if she takes each moment for what it is and savours their time together. There might not be much she can do for her father, but she can spend significant time with him.

“Today, I caught you in the garage, eating the peaches from the earthquake kit. I joined you. We drank the syrup and then we drank the packets of water.

Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.”

This is such a warm and generous wee novel. It’s not without its heartbreaking moments. At one point her father, realising what Ruth’s sacrificing, encourages her to move on with her life and I found this exchange particularly poignant

“You didn’t want me feeling obligated to stay. You said you didn’t want me feeling guilty. You said you didn’t want me seeing you act loony tunes.”

Khong has Ruth respond with sensitivity and quick humour, giving her father a dose of daughterly cheek. It’s in these small and incredibly familiar moments that Goodbye, Vitamin really soars. This is such a realistic picture of a tight knit family dealing with a difficult situation in the only way they know how: food, time, love and taking the piss.

Goodbye Vitamin was published by Schribner in 2017