Writing Forgetting
Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.
An ongoing archive for the arts of memory and memory loss.
A Line of Light from Show Me the Place. 2024.
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.
“Memory as thought before thought and knowledge before knowledge: memory as a way of editing our own life; memory as a way of joining all our different selves together to form a coherent whole; not a tool for thinking but an act of thinking; memory as a lie, as a creation, a different kind of truth. Collective. Deeply personal. At war with death.”
“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...”
Dementia & the arts. Memory, 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.
De Souza, Natalie. ‘The Dark Tangle of Alzheimer’s.’ New York Review of Books. 22 February 2024. Reviewed: How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s by Karl Herrup. 2021.
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’. ‘Losing it: Dementia on Film Stage and Page.’ 2015.
Halpern, Sue. ‘Heart of Darkness’ New York Review of Books. 26 September 2002. Reviewed: The Forgetting: Alzheimer's, Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk; The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young by Gary Small, M.D; A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey, M.D; The Aging Brain by Lawrence Whalley & Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio.
‘How to Die’ podcast: Episode 31: The Dementia Carer. Sean O’Connor with Karen Borochowitz.
Kiper, Dasha. Travellers to Unimaginable Lands: Dementia, Carers and the Hidden Workings of the Mind. 2023. Review in Guardian.
Kitwood, Tom. Dementia Reconsidered. 1997.
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.
Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian Borges and Memory. 2012. The Forgetting Machine. 2017.
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.
Wilkinson, Alec. ‘Illuminating the Brain’s “Utter Darkness”’. New York Review of Books. 9 February 2023. Review of The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron by Benjamin Ehrlich. 2023.
Young, Scott. ‘The Complete Guide to Memory.’ 2019.
“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.”
“Through the Alzheimer’s prism, we can experience life’s constituent parts and understand better its resonances and quirks. And as the disease relentlessly progresses toward the final dimming of the su fferer, it forces us to experience death in a way it is rarely otherwise experienced. What is usually a quick flicker we see in super slow motion, over years. It is more painful than many people can even imagine, but it is also perhaps the most poignant of all reminders of why and how human life is so extraordinary. It is our best lens on the meaning of loss.”
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’.
Anne Carson, ‘Life is Not Fair’. 19 September 2024. Interview at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. On memory, autofiction, and her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
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.
Dunlap-Shohl, Peter. My Degeneration: A Journey through Parkinson’s. 2015. Graphic medicine.
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.
Nunez, Sigrid. ‘I Remember’. Harper’s. November 2023.
Pratchett, Terry. ‘A Butt of My Own Jokes’, 2008. ‘Shaking Hands with Death’. BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture, 2010.
Saunders, Gerda. ‘My Dementia’. Slate magazine. May 2016. Originally published as ‘Telling Who I Am Before I Forget’. The Georgia Review 67:4, 2013.
Saunders, Gerda. Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia. 2017. See also ‘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.
“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.”
“I have delivered these pages in their original form, echoing the bewilderment, pain and distress that I experienced at the time”
“I am on the cusp of a new world, a place I will be unable to describe. It is the last hidden place, and marked with a headstone....It is lonely here waiting for memory to stop and I am afraid and tired.”
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. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Borges and Memory. 2012.
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.
Saunders, Gerda. ‘A Sudden New City’ in Blessings on the Sheep Dog: Stories. 2002.
Thomas, Matthew. We Are Not Ourselves. 2014.
Zeller, Florian. Le Père. 2012. (Adapted into 2020 film The Father).
“Today my mother gave me a thorough dusting, thinking I was a piece of furniture. Perhaps a chest of drawers or an old cooker…”
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.
O’Connell, Mark. ‘Total Recall’, New York Review of Books. 24 November, 2024. ‘Neuralink’ technology and the (speculative) novel.
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 on screen, 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.
The Rest I Make Up: A film with Maria Irene Fornes with Michelle Memran.
Marjolein Geysels et al, ‘Making Dementia Matter Through Sound: The Stem&Luister Project of the Genetic Choir.’ Voices 24:1, 2024.
Photography:
Maja Daniels, ‘Into Oblivion’ (2007-10).
Christopher Nunn, ‘Falling Into the Day’ (2009-16). Port magazine.
Cheney Orr, ‘Here is a Poem’ & ‘A Father, a Son, a Disease and a Camera’, New York Times, 18 January 2018.
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 regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. Only what I want to preserve for myself has any claim to be preserved for others. So I ask my memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark. ”