Contemporary Authors

• Somebody I Used to Know: A Memoir - 2018 Bloomsbury Publishing , New York, NY

• Amazon -

  Wendy Mitchell spent twenty years as a non-clinical team leader in the NHS before being diagnosed with Young Onset Dementia in July 2014 at the age of fifty-eight. Shocked by the lack of awareness about the disease, both in the community and in hospitals, she vowed to spend her time raising awareness about dementia and encouraging others to see there is life after a diagnosis. She is now an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society. She has two daughters and lives in Yorkshire.

• Waterstones - https://www.waterstones.com/blog/somebody-i-used-to-know-a-qanda-with-wendy-mitchell

  QUOTED: "I suppose most of my learning has been about discovering how resilient and strong I am at facing this head-on. We all so often spend our time craving to be like other people instead of celebrating our own strengths. Having dementia can be a lonely existence and I wasn’t prepared to live alone with dementia for my only company. Perhaps that’s why this once-private person is now willing to go so public. It means I have so many others willing me to outwit the beast and virtually hugging me when I’m having a bad day."
  "I like to think of the ‘old me’ as still walking with me and helping me. I often talk to my old self and ask her what she would have done in a situation."

  Living with Dementia: A Q&A with Wendy Mitchell
  Posted on 16th February 2018 by Martha Greengrass
  The first memoir ever written by someone living with dementia, Somebody I Used to Know is an extraordinary, informative and life-affirming read. In an exclusive interview, author Wendy Mitchell discusses the changes needed in the medical profession and society at large to help those living with dementia and how she has learned to live a life changed but not consumed by her diagnosis.
  Reading Somebody I Used to Know it struck me how much of our personality is made up of roles we play, be it daughter, mother, employee or friend. How much of your learning to live with dementia has been about finding who you are without those roles to define you?
  I suppose most of my learning has been about discovering how resilient and strong I am at facing this head-on. We all so often spend our time craving to be like other people instead of celebrating our own strengths.
  Having dementia can be a lonely existence and I wasn’t prepared to live alone with dementia for my only company. Perhaps that’s why this once-private person is now willing to go so public. It means I have so many others willing me to outwit the beast and virtually hugging me when I’m having a bad day.
  You’re very clear about defining yourself as a person living with dementia, not someone defined by the condition. How important do you think it is that people don’t make the mistake of confusing the diagnosis with the person?
  So important. We are so much more than a diagnosis. As I’m always saying, we all had talents before a diagnosis, we don’t suddenly lose all those talents overnight. Dementia may force us into living a different life but there is still so much living to be done and still much we CAN do. I never dwell on what dementia has stripped away from me, instead I concentrate on those things I CAN still do, albeit sometimes differently.
  The book sometimes appears to be a discussion between the version of you who is living with dementia and what you call the ‘old you’. What do you think the past version of Wendy would make of the person you are today?
  I like to think of the ‘old me’ as still walking with me and helping me. I often talk to my old self and ask her what she would have done in a situation.
  I hope she would be proud to see that I haven’t given in to dementia and let it win, just as the old me never gave in.
  I was struck by how little continuous help was available to you after your diagnosis. How do you think the medical profession could change to provide better support for people to live full and active lives with dementia?
  I think the medical profession would do well to concentrate on social prescription instead of medical prescription. The medical model just isn’t geared up for a dementia diagnosis – it’s an opt out. What we need is emotional, financial, and peer support post diagnosis. There’s nothing more comforting than hearing someone in a similar position say “oh yes, that happened to me’ – it reduces the isolation.

  No one should feel alone with dementia and yet many do. There are pockets of brilliant medical support around the country but it’s a huge postcode lottery. Charities are commissioned to provide services but not always by the right people with the right knowledge. That’s why my peer support group in York will soon be starting to run our own course for those diagnosed or recently diagnosed with dementia. We want to see if this could become a better option. It will be evaluated as we run it to provide evidence for the medical profession, so we’ll see.
  Have you been surprised and comforted by the enduring resilience of emotional connections, particularly with those people you love and care about most?
  My daughters are the two most important people in the world to me and we’ve been on a tough journey, but the one thing we’ve found that gets us through is talking. If people don’t talk, how can you know how to help, or who is struggling? It works both ways and I’m still a mum first and foremost, so I always try to be aware when my daughters aren’t coping well.
  You use technology often in your daily life to help to navigate areas of your life from communication to keeping track of your diary. Would you like to see more resource dedicated to looking at the ways in which technology can be used and developed to help people with dementia? Are there any developments you’ve found particularly (perhaps surprisingly) beneficial?
  I’m continually learning. There are many projects in the pipeline regarding technology. People in the future will expect to rely on technology, so to not develop now wouldn’t make sense.

  I suppose the most useful yet simple tool we use on our phones is called ‘Find Friends’. It helps my daughters to simply and easily see where I am, and then check that I’m supposed to be there - ha! It means they don’t worry as much as if we didn’t have that simple app. One venue gave me a wonderful talking video map which took me on a virtual walk from the station to the venue. It was perfect and stopped me from getting lost. More of these options would be wonderful but people should remember that we need the instructions in reverse as well!
  Why do you think we’ve established a position where people with dementia are often isolated and, to some extent, kept hidden from the rest of society? Would you agree that it’s essential that we becoming better at making our society more open, flexible and inclusive to people with dementia?
  I think this is simply due to fear. People often don’t seek a diagnosis because of the label that will be attached. We have a complex brain disease so why be ashamed or embarrassed? Talking about it openly removes the fear. Not talking about something that’s feared doesn’t make it magically disappear.

  Communities could help by accepting that people with dementia are going to exist in their community, and not segregating us. I don’t always want to take part in a group activity solely for people with dementia, I’d also like to join the general community in groups. I don’t want a dementia café, I want to meet my friends with dementia in Cafe Nero or somewhere regular. We’re often segregated as a matter of course instead of thinking that there might be other options.
  You write very movingly about how your friends and daughters have become ‘guardians of the past’, holding on to memories you can no longer keep. How much of a comfort is it to you to be able to pass these memories on, to know that they will continue to exist even when you can no longer remember them?
  Very comforting. That’s why I have my memory room, so that they know what and where is important to me, and it’s also why I have two memory boxes – one pre dementia and one post dementia.

  Again, it comes down to talking. Often in care homes and hospitals, staff refer to those with dementia as having ‘challenging behaviour’ when in fact it is more likely to be ‘distressed behaviour’. If they took the time to find out about the person they would see there is a reason for how they’re behaving. For example, one dementia patient in hospital used to insist on sitting behind the nurses station, and he was seen as a nuisance. But then they discovered that he used to be a nurse, and was re-living the time when he was a nurse, so it all made sense.
  Some of the most affecting and poignant moments of the book are your descriptions of the close relationship between you and your daughters. To what extent do you think it’s important that in recognising the effects of dementia, people consider the impact on friends and loved ones and the support they also need? If you could pass on just one lasting piece of advice to your daughters, what would it be?
  When a person gets a diagnosis of dementia, so too do their family and friends. We all need education, support and advice. My daughters and I had to work all this out for ourselves and we’re still continually learning.
  My one piece of advice?
  Don’t dwell on the future. We have no control over how this will all end so why dwell on something over which we have no control? Instead let’s enjoy today and live in the moment - and if today is a bad day, well tomorrow may be better. I’ll always love my daughters no matter whether I know who is stood before me or not.
  If could give a message to someone receiving a diagnosis of dementia today, what would it be?
  Don’t fear dementia. It’s not the end but the beginning of a different life; a life of adapting. Yes it’s a bummer of a diagnosis, but if you think of it in this way, it will be a much calmer and more manageable journey.

• Wendy Mitchell Weblog - https://whichmeamitoday.wordpress.com/

  Hello and welcome to my blog. On the 31st July 2014 I was diagnosed with Young onset dementia. I may not have much of a short-term memory anymore but that date is one I’ll never forget.

  Me – 59 years young with my wonderful daughters:)
  I’m 61 years young, live happily alone in Yorkshire, have 2 daughters and I continued to work full time in the NHS until the end of March 2015, when I chose to take early retirement to enable me to enjoy being me while I’m able. I have never ‘tweeted’, ‘blogged’ or ‘facebooked’ in my life but since I was diagnosed, everything else in my life has changed, so why not this. I hope you find my ramblings of interest.
  I started this blog to allow me, in the first instance, to write all my thoughts before they’re lost. Luckily the part of my brain that allows me to type hasn’t broken yet and I find that easier than talking. I have calendars that take care of the future but this blog serves as a reminder of what I’ve done and said in the past – it now serves as my memory. If anyone chooses to follow my ramblings it will serve as a way of raising awareness.
  It will hopefully convey the helplessness of those diagnosed with dementia, as there is no cure – the end is inevitable. However, I’m also hoping I can convey that, although we’ve been diagnosed, people like me still have a substantial contribution to make; we still have a sense of humour; we still have feelings. I’m hoping to show the reality of trying to cope on a day-to-day basis with the ever-changing environment that dementia throws at those diagnosed with the condition. Living as well as you can with dementia is all about adapting. Adapting to new ways to enable us to live better for longer with dementia.
  What I want is not sympathy. What I want is simply to raise awareness.
  I’m now the proud author of the Sunday Times Best Seller, Somebody I Used to Know, which just goes to show, you should never give up on yourself.

  Click on the ‘Blogs’ tab to see what you’ve missed and then click to ‘follow’ me if you’d like to receive my daily blogs in your inbox.
  If you prefer to comment by email please feel free – wendy7713@icloud.com or you can find me on Twitter @WendyPMitchell

QUOTED: "a sensitive, affective, and moving chronicle of how a woman with Alzheimer's has refused to let the disease completely rule her life."

Mitchell, Wendy: SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW

Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mitchell, Wendy SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW Ballantine (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5247-9791-1
How a woman's diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's changed her life.
It crept up on Mitchell gradually as a general feeling of tiredness and a fuzziness to her thinking, then one day, she fell, and a few weeks later, fell again, her coordination definitely off. Cognitive tests revealed the diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's, and Mitchell felt her world slowly slide away in forgotten bits and pieces. In this moving, well-written memoir, Mitchell relates how her life inevitably changed; she went from a person whose work required her to remember tremendous amounts of information to someone who didn't understand the computer system she had navigated so easily; she needed to leave herself reminders on her phone and notes on the floor to eat and take her medications; she no longer dared drive and felt anxious riding the bus or walking in unknown neighborhoods. Yet, once she was forced to retire, her life was still full; she reached out to others with the same diagnosis, gave talks on the topic, and engaged in research projects that might help someone in the future. Mitchell's sharing of the personal details of her mental decline helps readers thoroughly understand the scariness and confusion that Alzheimer's patients go through as they gradually lose the ability to take care of themselves and perform daily tasks that used to be done by rote. She triumphantly shows methods she used to help overcome some of her setbacks so she could continue to live independently, offering others with this disease examples of what can be done. The journey continues to grow harder, but Mitchell obviously refuses to give up, as evidenced by her writing this poignant statement of her life after the diagnosis.
A sensitive, affective, and moving chronicle of how a woman with Alzheimer's has refused to let the disease completely rule her life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mitchell, Wendy: SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d394e8a. Accessed 8 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700454

QUOTED: "Anyone who has lived with someone with Alzheimer's will recognise many of the frustrations and fears that Mitchell writes about."
"Despite this horrendous disease she has made something positive of her new life with humour, truth and grace, this book giving a unique insight into what it's like to live with Alzheimer's."

A stranger to oneself

Elisabeth Anderson
Spectator. 336.9885 (Feb. 10, 2018): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Somebody I Used To Know
by Wendy Mitchell and Anna Wharton
Bloomsbury, [pounds sterling] 16.99, pp. 320
Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58, three years ago. At the time, she was a non-clinical team leader in the NHS, managing rosters for hundreds of nurses and keeping much of the information stored in her head. She lived in York and had brought up two much-loved daughters on her own. She was clearly efficient, organised and independent. Mitchell realised something was wrong when, after a series of falls, she experienced a distinct lack of energy (she had been a keen runner and walker): a 'fog' in her head. The diagnosis was slow--her GP initially told this fit and able woman that 'there comes a time when we all have to admit to ourselves that we're just slowing down'--but it was confirmed after a series of visits to a neurologist and various scans and memory tests.
Somebody I Used to Know, written with the help of the journalist Anna Wharton, is Mitchell's memoir of her life after diagnosis, a record of how she spends her days, and her thoughts, emotions and fears. At first, she felt abandoned by doctors:
I have heard nothing from any doctor since my diagnosis three
months ago, nothing but one appointment at the memory clinic... How
can I help my daughters understand my diagnosis if I can't
understand it myself? That's what I feel angry about. That's why I
feel broken and abandoned, discarded by an NHS that I have worked
in for 20 years.
Mitchell, however, was determined to adapt to her changing circumstances, finding ways round problems, being positive and not letting dementia win. For example, she lost the ability to follow plots of new films, so she watched those she had seen dozens of times before:
Not that I can remember what happens--it's always a surprise at the
end--but I feel a certain familiarity throughout, a sense of the
ending, even if I don't remember the details.
She switched from reading novels to reading short stories and poetry. Clever.
Anyone who has lived with someone with Alzheimer's will recognise many of the frustrations and fears that Mitchell writes about: the stigma of a mental disease, the terror of getting lost, doctors' unhelpful remarks ('There's nothing we can do, I'm afraid,' she was told when given her diagnosis), so-called friends going to ground, the steady decline in memory and the increasing inability to speak to and recognise people.
Wendy Mitchell's lifeline came through contact with the Alzheimer's Society network: she began to meet other people with dementia, and became a Dementia Friends Champion. She continues to speak at conferences, writes a blog and has a Twitter account. So despite this horrendous disease she has made something positive of her new life with humour, truth and grace, this book giving a unique insight into what it's like to live with Alzheimer's.
One reads almost daily that lifestyle choices--exercise, diet, sleep, work and so on--will prevent the onset of dementia, but they did not in Mitchell's case. And the bleak fact is there is no cure. There are now 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with one in six over the age of 80 developing it. But there's been no new drug to treat it in the past 15 years. And the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced recently that it would stop work on new drugs to fight Alzheimer's and Parkinson's because it believed that its research didn't make sense financially. Depressing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anderson, Elisabeth. "A stranger to oneself." Spectator, 10 Feb. 2018, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538713141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=385cc1d6. Accessed 8 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A538713141

• The National
  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/book-review-somebody-i-used-to-know-is-a-vivid-memoir-about-dementia-that-offers-solidarity-and-hope-1.707280
  Word count: 1040

  QUOTED: "Her urgent present tense articulation of her day-to-day struggles, set against fragmented memories of the woman she used to be, is so close to the bone that
  it’s chilling.
  At the same time, however, it’s also an amazing testament to Mitchell’s tenacity, an account of how she’s developed coping mechanisms to continue living as independent a life for as long as possible."
  "For anyone affected by the disease, Somebody I Used to Know offers solidarity and hope."

  Book review: 'Somebody I Used to Know' is a vivid memoir about dementia that offers solidarity and hope

  Wendy Mitchell and Anna Wharton bring a struggle against Alzheimer’s to life in a vivid memoir

  Lucy Scholes
  February 24, 2018
  Updated: February 22, 2018 06:41 PM
  9

  A dementia memoir seems like a contradiction in terms, but that’s what makes Wendy Mitchell’s Somebody I Used to Know such a fascinating and groundbreaking book.
  Mitchell is diagnosed with early onset dementia when she’s 58. Two years earlier, she begins to experience symptoms: a lingering sense of something being not quite right, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. “How are you meant to describe these things?” she asks. “My head feels fuzzy, life is a little less sharp. What use would that generic description be? It would be better not to waste my GP’s time, and yet I know there’s something, an inkling that I am functioning around average.”
  She ends up in A & E one day after a bad and seemingly inexplicable fall while out running – no unforeseen dip in the path, no rogue paving stone to trip her up – but everyone is convinced it’s just an accident. She’s working too hard, her GP tells her, she’s just getting older, she needs to take it easy. This isn’t easy advice for Mitchell to hear. She’s proud of how active and independent she’s always been, how much energy she’s always had, how busy she’s kept, working full time for the NHS, bringing up her two daughters by herself, looking after her home and her garden.

  Months go by though and “the snowdrift” that’s settled in her mind remains in place. Then she takes another tumble – “something is lost, some message between my brain and my legs fails to get through fast enough” – then another, and another in quick succession. Her blood tests come back clear, but then suddenly one of her arms stops working and she’s slurring her speech: a small stroke. She’s signed off work while she recovers. A consultation with a neurologist follows, who in turn refers Mitchell to a clinical psychologist for memory tests. These complete, she has to wait six to 12 months to take them again: actual demonstration of deteriorating cognition is the only way to definitively diagnose dementia. It’s a gruelling waiting game.
  These early chapters read like something out of a horror story. We know what Mitchell’s diagnosis will be, but that’s not the point, the real terror is reading of the queasy confusion that creeps up on her. The fog that descends without warning that leaves her struggling to work out what’s going on. The day she finds herself sitting in front of her computer screen at work completely unable to work out what she should be doing or how to do it – “something isn’t clicking, I might as well be staring at a foreign language”. The meeting she’s in later that day during which the word “and” eludes her. The scary occasion she’s driving home in her car only to inexplicably find herself unable to make a right turn.
  Later, after her diagnosis and once she’s begun her work raising awareness about the condition – she’s an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society – travelling to conferences to give speeches, working with charities, the families of those affected, and the medical profession, people are so often amazed that she’s is there speaking for herself (eager to reclaim some agency of her own, she always describes herself as “living with dementia” rather than suffering from it).
  “Well, dementia has to start somewhere,” she tells a man who claims that his mother “really has dementia” after hearing Mitchell speak. This is the stage we aren’t so familiar with, when we see fictional characters with Alzheimer’s, we’re encouraged to sympathise with family members who’ve “lost” parents or partners to the disease. Think of the storyline on the American show Grey’s Anatomy, or Sarah Polley’s film Away From Her, which was based on Alice Munro’s short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain.
  ________________
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  Still Alice – Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s film, based on Lisa Genova’s novel of the same name – is probably the first, and certainly the most well-known portrait of the disease, not least because Julianne Moore won an Oscar for her performance in the title role, but Mitchell’s book – written, understandably, in collaboration with Anna Wharton – goes one step further. Her urgent present tense articulation of her day-to-day struggles, set against fragmented memories of the woman she used to be, is so close to the bone that
  it’s chilling.
  At the same time, however, it’s also an amazing testament to Mitchell’s tenacity, an account of how she’s developed coping mechanisms to continue living as independent a life for as long as possible. “I survive now by adapting,” she explains, “by focusing on what I can do.” For anyone affected by the disease, Somebody I Used to Know offers solidarity and hope: “There are ways of living with dementia, that far from a full stop, the beginning of the end, it can just be a comma.”

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/31/somebody-i-used-to-know-wendy-mitchell-review
  Word count: 1284

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  Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell review – dementia from the inside

  Mitchell was 58 when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. She began to write about the experience of losing herself, and the result is this remarkable memoir
  Aida Edemariam
  Wed 31 Jan 2018 07.30 GMT
  Last modified on Fri 25 May 2018 17.20 BST

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  Wendy Mitchell, photographed at her home near Hull. Mitchell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
  T
  hings begin, as so often, with a fall. A hard fall, while out running along the River Ouse in York, hard enough that Wendy Mitchell has to go to A&E; hard enough that when she goes back later to find the flagstone that caused it, the blood from where her face hit the pavement serves as a bright marker. Yet there is no obvious hazard.
  Then, another day, another fall. And another. The year before, she had completed the three peaks challenge; now she finds she must give up running. Then, after a couple of unsafe incidents on the road, driving. Parts of herself crumbling, or, one day, when she looks up from her desk at work and finds she has no idea what she’s doing there, dropping so fast it’s like “ripping a plaster away”. When she finally gets an official diagnosis it’s as though she already knows: early-onset Alzheimer’s. She is 58.
  This revelatory book, written with the journalist Anna Wharton, is a recording of Mitchell’s disappearance, as it happens. She is clear that the onset of the disease signals, for her, an existential rupture. There was a self before, and now that self has ceased to exist. “You”, her current self calls her previous self. “I remember the frantic pace, the speed with which you tackled things” – fell-walking, DIY, especially after the father of her two daughters left.
  She used to earn a wage as a cleaner, then, when the girls were older, as an NHS receptionist, working to become an all-competent leader of a team rostering nursing shifts in a busy hospital. That previous self seems, understandably from this specific vantage point, almost superhuman. A different story begins to leak out, however: loneliness, industriously hidden sadness, a stroke from stress and overwork. But “memory was your thing”, also independence, resourcefulness, pluck. A fighting spirit.
  There is still a person in there, forgetful, yes, confused, often, but still in need of love, conversation and laughter
  And these last, in fact, remain. Mitchell fights against everything about her disease, every step of the way, the very recording of its progress being one method (she keeps a blog, which provided the basis for the interviews that Wharton then used to stitch this account together). Writing and remembering to use her brain holds Alzheimer’s at bay for another hour, another week, another day. As, she believes, does her singleness: Mitchell is good on the double-edged sword of having dementia when one has a partner – about the guilt and the dependence, which, she thinks, hastens the progress of the disease.
  She rails against the system, by which she feels abandoned, first because “there is no follow-up after diagnosis. There is nothing they can do”; second because, when she tells her managers what is happening, expecting them to attempt flexibility, to trust her and work with her, they offer only early retirement. This is one of the baldest and thus weakest points in an otherwise textured book; I found it hard to believe that someone who worked in the NHS for 20 years could be so dismissive of it, wondering if something had been left out, or tweaked, for polemical effect.

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  1:26
  Wendy Mitchell describes what it's like to have Alzheimer's - video
  Much more interesting is her fierce alertness to others’ perceptions and preconceptions, understanding them because she herself once shared them: that dementia patients are very old, helpless, blank. Cancelled, in a way, as people. Like any progressive disease, dementia is a continuum, she tells once-friendly neighbours who cross the street to avoid her; it is also fitful – there are bad days, and good ones. And there is still a person in there, forgetful, yes, confused, often, but just as in need of validation and love and conversation and laughter as anyone else. She attacks the fear – which is of nightmares made real: words going missing in public meetings, being invisible. Whole familiar cities made alien. Sounds like gunshots ripping through her head. “I lost yesterday. I don’t know what happened to it.” This, a report from the other side, is one of the most valuable things about the book – a detailing of what the disease actually feels like, a demystification.
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  She arms herself with practical ingenuities: dementia bingo; iPads pinging to remind her to take pills, to eat. A bright pink bike, not because she especially likes pink, but because it would be harder to forget. Novels become impossible to read, so she reaches for short stories and poems. Each time she congratulates herself for staying a step ahead, but at her worst moments she wonders: “Wasn’t I going to see the world? What happened to all the time I thought I had?” And who is “I”, anyway? Pre-dementia Wendy? Today Wendy, who is different from tomorrow Wendy? For the reader, there is also the ventriloquised, ghostwritten “I”, complicating matters further.
  But the “I” fights for others too, for people with dementia everywhere – travelling up and down the country to talk to conferences, to researchers. She fights for positive language, asking student nurses what words spring to mind when they hear the term “dementia”: “demented, senile, burden, sufferer, old age, living death”. What about, for instance, replacing the passive “suffering” with the active “living with”? – things might feel more possible, there might be at least an illusion of agency.

  Wendy Mitchell on her extraordinary Alzheimer’s memoir
  Read more

  She learns, quickly, the “harsh lessons” Alzheimer’s teaches: a conscious tomorrow may not exist; live, then, as well as possible, in today. It is striking how much of self, she discovers, is located in language. Speaking becomes difficult, but she can still write as fast as ever, WhatsApping, blogging, emailing, until one day that stutters too. It comes back, but there is no mistaking the existential vertigo: “I have become used to looking up in familiar surroundings and not knowing where I am, but this was something else. I was lost inside. Screaming to get out. It was terrifying.”
  Talk, then. Talk as much as possible, while it is still possible. Talk to loved ones, explain what needs to happen, about care, about resuscitation, about death. Make choices now to make theirs, already hard, a little easier later. Brave the mutual dance of fear and reassurance. But what she can least bear is losing the future she thought she and her daughters had together. And so she redoubles her efforts, writing herself notes and instructions that collect in drifts on the floor, on her cupboards, on her walls, fragments shored against the coming ruin.
  Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale is published this month by 4th Estate.
  • Somebody I Used to Know is published by Bloomsbury. Save £5 on our book of the month. To order a copy for £11.99 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.