Tag: Woman
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“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…
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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…
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“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…
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“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.…
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“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…
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“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…
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“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…
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“Bailegangaire” by Tom Murphy
Mommo is an elderly Irish woman living with dementia, although Tom Murphy characterises her as senile. This is likely to be a reflection on both when the play is set and when it was written. Mommo lives in a small, rural cottage and is cared for by her granddaughter Mary, who is a trained nurse.…
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Away From Her
Canadian director, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her was one of my first encounters of a dementia narrative on the big screen. Polley wrote the screenplay based on Alice Munro’s beautiful short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain and was determined from the outset to cast Julie Christie in the lead as Fiona, a smart, passionate woman who is…
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“About My Mother” by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman Tahar is sitting at his mother’s bedside listening to her long-hidden secrets and stories unfold. Lalla Fatma has dementia. She is confused about where and when she’s living. As the novel plays out she frequently digresses back to her childhood in Fez in the 1940s.…