Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how collaborative dementia memoirs can challenge personalized approaches to authorship in impactful ways. Collaborative life-writing has traditionally grappled with the complex power dynamics inherent in multi-contributor narratives. Literary disability scholars have raised ethical concerns about the possible exploitation and erosion of agency among disabled subjects. As an alternative, this article advocates for a paradigm shift aligned with dementia self-advocates’ emphasis on interdependence, drawing on potentially productive concepts of shared authorship found in fan fiction. In fan communities, all fan fiction is perceived as oppositional to the authority of the single author, framing stories as dynamic rather than fixed to one voice. This perspective is applied to Slow Puncture (2020) by Peter Berry and Deb Bunt and Somebody I Used to Know (2018) by Wendy Mitchell with Anna Wharton, where collaboration and interdependence are central to narrating the dementia experience and negotiating both authors’ understandings of the condition, as well as facilitating self and mutual exploration through creative production. Also proposed is the concept of “agile authorship” to approach questions of authorship in collaborative memoirs by contributors with and without dementia.
Authors: Nicola Simonetti, Marialaura Grandolfo
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Wellcome Trust
OpenAlex ID: W7117110992