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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019d followed years ago, when their children were much younger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
John drives, though he\u2019s increasingly confused and occasionally wanders off, sometimes even threatening Ella with violence. Ella organises everything, though she\u2019s 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\u2019t tell them about any of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Leisure Seeker<\/em> is a strange little novel. It\u2019s very readable, but the tone is quite odd. It\u2019s hard to tell whether the reader\u2019s meant to see this last adventure as a joyous celebration of a life well-lived, or an example of selfishness on Ella\u2019s part. Though she isn\u2019t technically behind the wheel, this is very much her road trip. John does as he\u2019s told throughout the novel. For me this raised real questions about autonomy and freedom. It\u2019s 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\u2019s also a strange change of tone at the novel\u2019s close. For two thirds of the book it feels a little like a buddy movie: upbeat, funny, slightly sentimental, and then towards the novel\u2019s end things take a dark turn. I don\u2019t want to give away any plot spoilers but the final scene kind of calls into question the book\u2019s basic premise, that it is possible to live well and fully with dementia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s her understanding of her husband\u2019s 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<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Leisure Seeker was published by Harper Collins in 2009<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20,5,6,9,4,99],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-american","tag-carers","tag-family","tag-man","tag-novels","tag-suicide"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":391,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions\/391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}