KEEPER(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Five years ago, Andrea Gillies— writer, wife, and mother of
three—seeing that her husband’s parents were struggling to cope,
invited them to move in.  She and her newly extended family
relocated to a big Victorian house on a remote, windswept peninsula
in the far north of Scotland, leaving behind their friends and all
that was familiar;  hoping to find a new life, and new
inspiration for work.
　　Her mother-in-law Nancy was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s
Disease, and Keeper charts her journey into dementia, its impact on
her personality and her family, and the author’s researches into
what dementia is.   As the grip of her disease tightens,
Nancy’s grasp on everything we think of as ordinary unravels before
our eyes. Diary entries and accounts of conversations with Nancy
track the slow unravelling.  The journey is marked by
frustration, isolation, exhaustion, and unexpected black comedy.
For the author, who knew little about dementia at the outset, the
learning curve was steeper than she could have imagined. The most
pernicious quality of Alzheimer’s, Gillies suggests, is that the
loss of memory is, in effect, the loss of one’s self, and
Alzheimer’s, because it robs us of our intrinsic self-knowledge,
our ability to connect with others, and our capacity for
self-expression, is perhaps the most terrible and most dehumanizing
illness. Moreover, as Gillies reminds us, the effects of
Alzheimer’s are far-reaching, impacting the lives of caregivers and
their loved ones in every way imaginable.
　　Keeper is a fiercely honest “glimpse into the dementia abyss”—an
endlessly engrossing meditation on memory and the mind, on family,
and on a society that is largely indifferent to the far-reaching
ravages of this baffling disease.