It has everything; familial hatreds, great love, romance and failed relationships, attempts by the character to change patterns of life -in fact all the ingredients of a page -turner. It is written in a highly charged poetic style and is full of fine imagistic writing and It should be published both because of all the above and because it is an individual experience which has universal significance. - By Siobhan Campbell, Tutor on M A Creative Writing Course Kingston University
Description
Mad? Sad? Or Bad? the truth about Alzheimer's Disease. After a lifetime of coping with a very difficult - and sometimes nasty - mother, Patricia now faces her parent`s decline and impending death. As she guided her mother through family history, she tries to unravel what has always ailed the older woman.The story moves through darkness, to understanding and to skeletons in the cupboard. And ultimately to love.
But Patricia reaches a mind- blowing conclusion about what she believes to lie behind old age dementia.
About the Author
Pamela spent most of her working life bringing up four children and doing casual jobs.. she took a degree in English and at a local university and then taught in Adult Education and became a Market Research Interviewer. When her work dwindled in the Recession of the 1990s, she tried for a while to run her own private Adult Education business. She has always wanted to write and began in her twenties. She has broadcast her own talk on the radio, published some short stories and articles, and had prizes in a few writing competitions. Pamela lives in The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames.
Book Extract
'....And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' For the first time I am listening to what the nurse is saying about my eighty-eight year-old Mother.
'I like her, ' she had begun. What's all this? I asked myself. My mother's never got on with anybody, and probably nobody has ever liked her. She certainly doesn't like anyone much. We talk, as I scrabble around trying to remember how the conversation had started. 'She asked me where I came from. Tells me she has always wanted to travel...' Well, we all know that old story, don't we?
'...And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' That's when my ears pricked up. I'd hardly been listening, having looked after my mother for as long as I can remember, having lived her life rather than my own... But now this, at nearly ninety and last week nearly dead. 'What do you mean, what do you mean? In and out - in and out?'
'Oh - everything, ' the nurse laughs. 'And it is so good for you, because it's genetic.' Genetic? I am her, not exactly a case of symbiosis, since it has not been beneficial to me, but something like that.
A week ago, I stood over my mother, having been summoned to what I had thought was her deathbed. She was asleep, but gasping in her sleep, and I thought, 'Are you gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life? No, what I really thought was, you look like I feel. Gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life. And now this, the perfect figure? A young girl's body beneath that weary face? The tune 'Beautiful Dreamer' comes back into my mind. I think she even used to sing it, way far back, or at least hum it anyway.
Beautiful Dreamer, a Sleeping Beauty, is it really that? Is that old face weary with disappointment? Because the young girl's body has never been satisfied? Yet my mother has never shown any strong desires for such needs to be fulfilled. I am a Sleeping Beauty too, but I know it.
