In Search of Lost Words: Novels on Dementia
André’s disintegrating mind stars in The Father, a play by Florian Zeller (translated from French by Christopher Hampton). André’s dementia progresses rapidly through one short act. By the time the curtain falls, he can no longer decode his environment, including his daughter and son-in-law. The audience, too, is left befuddled, unable to distinguish André’s imagined family from his real one. A recent production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre underscored André’s bewilderment by casting alternating black and white actors as the elusive, double sets of daughters and sons-in-law.
More often, we are privy to dementia’s impact on the people surrounding the patient. plumbs both perspectives—that of victim and family. As she was researching her new novel, , Golden stumbled over a disturbing question: Why are older African-Americans almost “twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to develop the disease or other forms of dementia?” Writing for , she spotlights medical studies that ignore people of color, resulting in a
