MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One of the more painful effects of dementia is its debilitating effect on an individual’s ability to organize coherent narratives, including one’s own life history.Recent scholars have explored the relationship between dementia and narratology:see, for example, Amy Robillard’s “On Narrative Collapse”(2014); Lars-Christer Hyden’s “Losing the Story”(2010); and Rebecca Bitenc’s “Life-Writing at the Limits”(2013).What interests me here is the use of narrators with dementia in mystery and detective fiction, among other things, for the way in which the genre serves as the perfect metaphor for the experience of living with dementia.In exploring Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind(2011) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing(2014), I consider the implications of the unreliable narrator.Is there a link with the eccentric, elderly female detective in the tradition of Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple? How is this figure like/unlike other contemporary neuro-diverse detectives with OCD or Asperger’s? How is this fiction informed by nonfiction narratives?In pursuing this topic I am also inspired by my mother’s ongoing struggle with dementia, particularly the ways in which she views her increasingly shrinking world as a mystery novel in which she is a Nancy Drew type sleuth solving what she cannot explain, from “strangers” visiting her house to the “disappearance” of objects that she has herself hidden.Constructing ingenious stories to fill in the gaps allows her to maintain some semblance of purpose and control; however, what might be interpreted as clever or heroic in a literary context is, objectively, a symptom of illness.