Female – Dementia Fiction

“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

“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