Andrea Gillies Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Andrea Gillies, author of Keeper, writes a letter to readers about caring for a family member with dementia.

Dear Reader,

When I was a carer of someone with Alzheimer's disease, my mother-in-law Nancy, I thought the fact that I'm a natural consumer of printed word, a gobbler of books and print information, would help me with my new role. I went out looking for guidance. Perhaps it was bad luck, but the books that I found in my local bookshop were of the kind that reassure a carer that all will be well with the right approach: that, in effect, the happiness or otherwise of the person with dementia is down to the right kind of handling.

I've learned that this is nonsense. Dementias are unlike any other kind of disease in being diseases of Selfhood. The physical progress of Alzheimer's through the brain, robbing a person first of memory and then of the autobiographical basis of identity, is to blame for the unhappiness that Alzheimer's brings. It's often thought that memory is a vault, an archive that we can visit, but the truth is that it's a process, an orchestral process fuelled by millions of co-operative neurons working together. 'Self,' the experience of self, self-knowledge, is likewise a process and not something fixed. It is constantly being made and remade—and so it can be unmade. Consciousness isn't just ...