Reading as Caring: Older Lay Readers’ Responses to the Dementia Narrative Stammered Songbook

This chapter examines the responses of an age-60+ reading and writing group to the dementia narrative Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours (2011) by Flemish author Erwin Mortier in an effort to include older lay people’s voices in literary aging studies. The establishment of the group, inspired by the empirical approach of the Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (Brunel University), enabled the collection and elicitation of a range of data: questionnaires, group discussion, reading diaries, and a creative writing assignment. The close reading of these data resulted in the identification of three themes. The first concentrates on affect in Stammered Songbook and participants’ (lack of) affective responses to the memoir. The second considers style and readers’ opposition to the possible negative effects of figurative language. The third relates to what the participants considered missed care opportunities as well as their understandings of good dementia care. Older lay readers combined appreciation for the dementia memoir as art with reading against the grain. Resistant reading and writing became their practice of caring for Mortier’s mother, who is living with Alzheimer’s disease. Statements about interdependence and the fundamental vulnerability of being human were contradicted with the consensus that it is better to be dead than to lose autonomous agency.