Main description:

This volume seeks to bring readers to a deeper understanding of contemporary cultural and social configurations of Alzheimer's disease by analyzing 21st-century U.S. novels in which the disease plays a key narrative role.

Via analysis of selected works, Garrigos considers how the erasure of memory in a person with Alzheimer's affects our idea of the identity of that person and their sense of belonging to a group. Starting out from three different types of memory (individual, social and cultural), the study focuses on the narrative strategies that authors use to configure how the disease is perceived and represented.

This study is significant not only because of what the texts reveal about those with Alzheimer's, but also for what they say about us - about the authors and readers who are producing and consuming these texts, about how we see this disease, and what our attitudes to it say about contemporary U.S. society.

Contents:

Introduction

PART I

Individual Memory

1 The Three Lessons on Alzheimer's in Lisa Genova's Still Alice

2 Memory Blanks, Confinement, and Mystery in Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind.

PART II

Social Memory

3 Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves: Alzheimer's and the Failure of the American Dream

4 Interdependence and Memorial Identity in Marita Golden's The Wide Circumference of Love

5 Memory Loss and Infantilization in Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin

PART III

Cultural Memory

6 The Amnesiac Rapture of Alzheimer's: Stefan Merrill Block's The Story of Forgetting

7 Satire in Chuck Palahniuk's Representation of Alzheimer's Disease in Choke

8 Ruth Ozeki's Alzheimer's as Cultural Forgetting in All over Creation and A Tale for the Time Being

Bibliography

Index