Dementia and the Bestselling Novel - Martina Zimmermann

Evolving at the boundary between literature, science and medicine, my research takes a historical approach to understanding the current cultural dementia narrative – situating literary writings about dementia within their contemporaneous cultural, scientific and medical contexts. In my earlier work, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing (2017), I have reflected on gradual changes in patient and caregiver life-writing since the late 1980s. In this paper, I focus on fictional texts published during the same time-span. In particular, I explore what J. Bernlef’s bestselling Out of Mind reveals about the cultural image of dementia in the mid-1980s. In parallel, I will read present-day dementia narratives that headed bestseller lists, including Debra Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad (2006) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014). This comparative reading will interrogate how these texts – as published and bestselling in the 1980s as compared to today – have, in their time, delivered on the expectations of a broad readership. I will also explore how the deployment of dementia in these texts contributed to the development of a cultural dementia narrative that informs the current situation of patients and their care. 

Martina's first degree is in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and she has a PhD in Neuropharmacology. Since having obtained her Habilitation in Pharmacology and Toxicology at Goethe University Frankfurt, she holds a honorary Associate Professor position (Privatdozentin) at the Department of Pharmacology, Goethe University Frankfurt.

At KCL, she completed a second, Wellcome Trust funded PhD (Department of English and Centre for the Humanities and Health) on Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature in the Twentieth Century. Her first monograph, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer's Disease Life-Writing, is part of the Literature, Science and Medicine series of the Palgrave imprint (open access funded by the Wellcome Trust). Martina is currently working on her second book, about cultural and scientific dementia narratives.

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