Stories we tell about dementia

The dementias are illnesses which have significant cultural prominence and feature in a wide range of contemporary writing, often as a trope for old age. This thesis examines how stories of dementia are told in fiction and in the clinic. To do this, the work uses Arthur Frank's socio-narratology to examine twelve selected texts in which a key protagonist has dementia. Three of the selected texts have been written by authors with direct experience of dementia within their family and form a subset of texts, memoir fiction. How stories of dementia are told is considered by examining the clinic as a storytelling venue, the creation of faux medical notes from information in the texts and a Triple Analysis of the memoir fiction using three reading templates. The templates have been created from clinical practice, using the questions posed by Frank's socio-narratological practice of Dialogical Narrative Analysis, and using the parameters of Rita Charon's version of Close Reading drill in Narrative Medicine. The work is informed by autoethnography which uses my position as a clinician and reader to examine how fiction has been used in my clinical practice and how it informs my reading of the selected texts