Keeper: Living with Nancy. A Journey into Alzheimer's
Andrea Gillies
Keeper: Living with Nancy. A Journey into Alzheimer's
Three years ago, Andrea Gillies made the decision to take on the full-time care of her mother-in-law, Nancy, an Alzheimer's sufferer. With her family, she moved to a remote peninsula in northern Scotland - to a house with sufficient space to accommodate Nancy and her elderly husband Morris - and there embarked on an extraordinarily challenging journey. Keeper describes the terrible emotional strain of living with Alzheimer's, the trials faced by both sufferer and carer, when patience and obligations are pushed to the limit...
5.0 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Health & Medical, Family & Lifestyle |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
256 |
| RRP |
£11.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-1906021658 |
| Publisher |
Short Books |
| |
Three years ago, Andrea Gillies made the decision to take on the full-time care of her mother-in-law, Nancy, an Alzheimer's sufferer. With her family, she moved to a remote peninsula in northern Scotland - to a house with sufficient space to accommodate Nancy and her elderly husband Morris - and there embarked on an extraordinarily challenging journey. Keeper describes the terrible emotional strain of living with Alzheimer's, the trials faced by both sufferer and carer, when patience and obligations are pushed to the limit...
Winner of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize (2009) and the Orwell Prize (2010)
Read an extract from the book at MailOnline
Reviews
The Observer
Kate Kellaway
“[An] outstanding memoir… The author has tremendous literary sensibility, nimble comic gifts and an over-developed capacity for self-criticism.”
12/06/2010
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The Times
Anjana Ahuja
“...a beautifully observed, utterly honest and emotionally draining account of neurological illness, struggling to cope, and human identity... Not only does Gillies write about how her mother-in-law’s brain is changing (she is a gifted science communicator), she also deals unflinchingly with the public-image problem of dementia.”
24/06/2010
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The Sunday Times
Phil Baker
“Despite the grisly subject, this is a compulsively readable and culturally clued-up book, drawing lightly on Proust, Marcus Aurelius and Ravel (who died of early-onset dementia, and whose classic Boléro is now thought to show signs of so-called “perseveration” in its repetitions). Several larger points emerge from Gillies’s experience: memory is what makes us who we are and, what is more, “we are our brains” and hostage to their physical state. Her book is a valuable exploration of a landscape we urgently need to understand better now that so many of us are going to go there.”
06/06/2010
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