Writing Forgetting
Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.
Public lecture series on life-writing, autobiography, personal narrative (University of Cape Town Summer & Winter School: January & August 2020). MA seminar on memory, trauma and the limits of language. An ongoing archive for the arts of memory and memory loss.
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.
“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties and embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves. [...] As every creature is furnished with teeth to seize and eat, and with stomach to digest its food, so the memory is furnished with a perfect apparatus. There is no book like the memory, none with such a good index, and that of every kind, alphabetic, systematic, arranged by names of persons, by colors, tastes, smells, shapes, likeness, unlikeness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to catch and hold, and contrivances for giving a hint.”
Dementia & the arts, medicine & the humanities
Bitenc, Rebecca. Reconsidering Dementia Narratives: Empathy, Identity and Care. 2019.
Block, Stefan Merrill. ‘A Place Beyond Words: The Literature of Alzheimer’s’. The New Yorker. 20 August 2014.
Centre for the Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes: 4E Cognition and Memory. Memory Colloquium, May 2022: Virtual seminar.
Charon, Rita. ‘The Parallel Chart’, Narrative Medicine: Honouring the Stories of Illness. 2006
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Memory’ from Natural History of the Intellect. 1871.
Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory. 2013
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. 2014.
Gerrard, Nicci. ‘Words Fail Us: Dementia and the Arts.’ 2015.
Gerrard, Nicci. What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. 2019. ‘Brain, Mind and Self’, ‘Memory and Forgetting’.
Kiper, Dasha. Travellers to Unimaginable Lands: Dementia, Carers and the Hidden Workings of the Mind. 2023. Review in Guardian.
Kitwood, Tom. Dementia Reconsidered. 1997.
‘Losing it: Dementia on Film Stage and Page.’ 2015.
Lock, Margaret. The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging. 2013.
MacFarquhar, Larissa. ‘The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care’. The New Yorker. 1 October, 2018. Video.
Maginess, Tess ed. Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. 2018.
‘Memory and Forgetting: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat’. Radiolab (podcast). 7 June 2007.
Sacks, Oliver. ‘The Lost Mariner’. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. 1985.
Sacks, Oliver. ‘The Aging Brain’. In Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales. 2019.
Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. 2001.
Shenk. David. The Forgetting: Portrait of an Epidemic. 2001. (Originally published as Understanding Alzheimer’s: the Biography of a Disease).
‘Thinking With Dementia.’ Somatosphere. Multi-author series. 2018.
‘Not Quite a Miracle’ (9 June 2021) & ‘The Alzheimer’s Casino: Big Money and Bad Science’ (14 November 2022). The Slow Newscast / Sensemaker Audio (podcast). Tortoise Media.
Young, Scott. ‘The Complete Guide to Memory.’ 2019.
Memoir & personal narrative
Bayley, John. ‘An Elegy for Iris’. July 1998, The New Yorker. The Iris Trilogy: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. 2003.
Brown, Celia. ‘So Nice to Hear Your Voice’. This American Life #737, ‘The Daily’.
Crowley, John. ‘The Old Imperium: Learning to Live with my Aging Mind’. January 2022, Harper’s.
DeBaggio, Thomas. Losing my Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s. 2002.
Franzen, Jonathan. ‘My Father’s Brain.’ In How to Be Alone: Essays. 2001.
Geiger, Anne. The Old King in His Exile. 2017.
Joubert, Elsa (trans. Michiel Heyns). Cul-de-sac. 2019.
Kozain, Rustum. ‘Dagga: An Extract’. African Cities Reader. 2017.
Martin, Julia. The Blackridge House. 2019.
Mathias, John. ‘Living with a Visionary’. 2021.
Mitchell, Wendy. Somebody I Used to Know: A Memoir. 2018. Review and interview with Nicci Gerrard.
Saunders, Gerda. Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia. 2017. (And ‘A Sudden New City’ in Blessings on the Sheep Dog: Stories. 2002)
Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Suitcase. 2021. Serialised in LRB.
Snyder, Lisa. Speaking Our Minds: What It’s Like to Have Alzheimer’s. 2009.
Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. 2013.
Tillman, Lynne. Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death and Ambivalence. 2022. Review by Meghan O’Rourke, Bookforum.
Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography. 1964.
Fiction, plays & poetry
Barr, Emily. The One Memory of Flora Banks. 2016.
Bernlef, J. Out of Mind. 1989.
Block, Stefan Merrill. The Story of Forgetting. 2008.
Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘Funes the Memorious’. 1942.
Dean, Debra. The Madonnas of Leningrad. 2007.
Dowling, Finuala. Notes from the Dementia Ward. 2008.
Fosse, Jon. Melancholy. 1995.
Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. 2001.
Genova, Lisa. Still Alice. 2007.
Gospodinov, Georgi. Time Shelter. Trans. Angela Rodel. 2022.
Harvey, Samantha. The Wilderness. 2010.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. 2015.
Keyes, Daniel. ‘Flowers for Algernon’. 1959.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. 2013.
Lethem, Jonathan. The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss. 2000.
Modiano, Patrick. Missing Person. 1978, trans. 1980.
Mortier, Erwin. Stammered Songbook. 2015.
Munro, Alice. ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories. 2001. (Adapted into 2006 film Away from Her.)
Ogawa, Yoko. The Memory Police. 1994. Trans. Stephen Snyder, 2019.
Ogawa, Yoko, The Housekeeper and the Professor. 2003. Trans. Stephen Snyder, 2008. Also a film: The Professor’s Beloved Equation, 2006.
Thomas, Matthew. We Are Not Ourselves. 2014.
Zeller, Florian. Le Père. 2012. (Adapted into 2020 film The Father).
Memory & forgetting in the digital age
Francis, Gavin. ‘The Dream of Forgetfulness.’ 9 March 2023. Review of Scott A. Small, Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering and Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.
Hartford, Anna. ‘Forget Me, Forget Me Not: What Should the Internet Remember?’ 2019.
Horning, Rob. ‘Overreliance as Service’, Internal Exile. 17 March 2023.
Lerner, Ben. ‘The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory.’ Harper’s. December 2023.
Massey, Alan. ‘Broken Links: Do I Really Want the Net to Forget My Teenage Self?’ 2015.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. 2009.
Pearcy, Aimee, ‘Grief in the Age of AI’, Guardian. 18 July 2023.
‘The Persistence of Memory: Dementia and Digital Aid Tools for Decision-Making’. Zurich University of the Arts, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME, UZH) Institute of Regenerative Medicine. Artists’ residency.
Betsy Sparrow et al. ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.’ Science 333, 776-778 (2011).
Toobin, Jeffrey. ‘The Solace of Oblivion.’ 2014.
Beyond words: dementia in sound & visual arts.
‘Before I Forget’: Role playing game (RPG) about living with dementia.
The Caretaker, ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’. Interview with Leyland James Kirby, ‘Out of Time.’ The Quietus, 22 September 2016. Review by Simon Reynolds, The Wire, June 2019.
Marjolein Geysels et al, ‘Making Dementia Matter Through Sound: The Stem&Luister Project of the Genetic Choir.’ Voices 24:1, 2024.
Photo essays: ‘Falling Into the Day’, ‘Here is a Poem’, ‘Into Oblivion’.
Radiolab, ‘Unraveling Bolero’.
Utermohlen, William. Self-portraits.
Wood, Stuart. ‘Beyond Messiaen’s Birds: The Post-Verbal world of Dementia’, Medical Humanities 46 (2020):73-83.
“I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we’ll have that, one must have something, it’s a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that’s enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there’s only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it’s steps coming and going, it’s voices speaking for a moment, it’s bodies groping their way, it’s the air, it’s things, it’s the air among the things, that’s enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it’s not clear, dear dear, you say it’s not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I’ll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I’m always seeking something, it’s tiring in the end, and it’s only the beginning.”
