Andrea Gillies’s memoir, Keeper, trails awards and awed reviews, and I can see why. Though I wasn’t looking forward to still another account of life with deepening dementia, I read this one in a day. Gillies’s saga, subtitled One House, Three Generations and a Journey into Alzheimer’s, unfolds on a blustery peninsula in northern Scotland, where she and her husband, their three children and his ailing parents have all moved into a drafty Victorian house miles from anywhere.
Gillies’s father-in-law can barely walk; her mother-in-law, Nancy, is already paranoid and obstreperous. As the author, a journalist, lays out her plan to restore the overgrown garden and take lovely walks by the sea while working at home, caring for old and young and running a bed and breakfast, I could feel my anxiety rising.
How, exactly, was one mortal supposed to manage all that?
As readers here have reason to suspect, unhappy surprises lie ahead. But I kept reading because Gillies is such a gorgeous writer, because Nancy is so compelling in her ferocity, and because their relationship — part dance, part duel — is hard to look away from.
No comments:
Post a Comment