Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself

Description

When Jonathan Taylor was nine he began to find his father puzzling. The first thing that happened was that, just for a moment, he couldn't remember his daughter's name. Then came the question of remembering whether Jonathan and his friends had asked for tea or orange juice, or anything to drink at all. Then his father began to shake, to drive badly, to be awkward, to forget who or where he was, and to mistake his son for someone else entirely. His son's puzzlement became embarrassment - embarrassment turned to worry, worry changed to pity and rage. 'Help, help, help, help, help,' his father would say, on and on, but there seemed to be no helping him. Eventually, a doctor gave the diagnosis: Parkinson's. At the age of fourteen, Jonathan became one of his father's carers and took it in turn with his family to look after him for the next thirteen years. Take Me Home is the story of a boy's struggle to love a father who is being transformed mentally and physically by a ruinous disease. It is an adult's struggle to discover a father's strange and largely secret past - who he was before he became a disappointed headmaster in Stoke-on-Trent and, at the last, a trembling incontinent who could mistake his son for Humphrey Bogart. In it, the mysteries of Parkinson's, of memory and of human kinship, are clearly and movingly revealed.

Jonathan Taylor is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He was born in 1973. This is his first book.

*'Very moving and beautifully written' - John Bayley *'A brave and unsentimental book' - Diana Athill