"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 parents 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.
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