Tag Archives: dementia

Annie Ernaux in the Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing

Delighted to learn that Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraint of personal memory’. I discuss Ernaux’s writing about her mother with dementia in my first book, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing (2017). The book is free to download thanks to Wellcome Trust funded open access.

Literature and Dementia Care

The title of the plenary lecture I delivered at the Symposium on Ethics, Agency, and Personhood in Dementia at the University of Southern Denmark, Copenhagen, in August 2022, reflecting on how particular genres, narrative perspectives and tropes may or may not be productive for an enabling approach to the person with dementia and their care. Great to join Marlene Goldman, Ina Kjogx Pedersen and Peter Simonsen for a panel discussion, moderated by Cindie Maagaard, on the use of narrative medicine in dementia care.

From a ‘care-free’ distance?

A book chapter on how adult sons perceive of themselves as they confront their parent’s older age and memory loss, reading Michele Farina’s Quando andiamo a casa? (2015), Jonathan Taylor’s Take Me Home (2007) and Nick Taylor’s A Necessary End (1994). In the open access essay collection Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), edited by Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney.