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Keeper: A Book About Memory, Identity, Isolation, Wordsworth and Cake ...

Keeper: A Book About Memory, Identity, Isolation, Wordsworth and Cake ...

by Andrea Gillies (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2010

    $3.42
Synopsis

Can our personalities be taken away from us? Are memory and identity mutually dependent? What exactly is the soul? Three years ago, Andrea Gillies, a writer and mother of three, took on the care of her mother-in-law Nancy, who was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease. This newly extended family moved to a big Victorian house on a headland in the far, far north of Scotland, where the author failed to write a novel and Nancy, her disease accelerated by change, began to move out of the rational world and into dementia's alternative reality. This book is a journal of life in this wild location, in which Gillies tracks Nancy's unravelling grasp on everything that we think of as ordinary, and interleaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer's works. For the family at the centre of this drama, the learning curve was steeper and more interesting than anyone could have imagined.

$3.42

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 320
 Publisher: Short Books Ltd
Published: 20 May 2010
ISBN 10: 1906021996
ISBN 13: 9781906021993
Prizes: Winner of Orwell Prize 2010 and Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009.

Media Reviews
Andrea Gillies's account of living with Alzheimer's is the perfect fusion of narrative with enough memorable science not to choke you. It's a fantastic book - down to earth and darkly comic in places. The judges found it compelling. Jo Brand A wonderful book honest, upsetting, tender, sometimes angry, often funny which takes us on a journey into dementia and explores what it means to be human. Deborah Moggach Terrific, terrifying, absolutely powerful in every choice of word, every sentence... completely unflinching Quentin Cooper This is not another guide to be added to the depressing pile by the bedside for those who are confronting the decline of a relative. It is as much an exploration of memory, its loss and the subsequent erosion of personality, as a chronicle of the destructive chaos that the onset of Alzheimer's unleashes on the extended family... Somehow, despite the territory, Gillies manages to steer the book away from misery lit and beneath the profoundly bleak narrative runs a stream of grim humour. Most powerful, however, is Nancy's own voice, carefully recorded by Gillies in nightly diary entries, a voice that is at times cantankerous, bewildered and defiant. Reading these monologues, we get very close to understanding what it feels like to experience this illness... What makes this book so unexpected is the honesty with which Gillies records the catastrophic consequences of this well-intentioned act. Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian Terrific, terrifying, absolutely powerful in every choice of word, every sentence... completely unflinching Quentin Cooper
Author Bio
Andrea Gillies has had a diverse career, encompassing writing, publicity work, the editorship of the Good Beer Guide, travel and reference book editing, and writing a drinks column for Scotland on Sunday newspaper. She's spent most of the last 18 years raising children, and latterly, living in a mansion on a remote peninsula in northern Scotland.