According to Dr. Marlene Goldman, literary critic and English professor at UTSC, discourses in contemporary North America frequently portray Alzheimer’s disease as a horror story. Through her research, Goldman hopes to show aspects of Alzheimer’s disease that society may have forgotten.

“How we narrate and how we speak of the stories we tell affect our relationships with the people we love, and affect what happens to those people and what happens to us as we age,” says Goldman.

By comparing a collection of views from the media, hands-on research, and the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada, Goldman finds literature offers a broader perspective that includes the life and experiences of people suffering from dementia and those of the victim’s caregivers.

“Those stories turn what the media describes as floods, monsters and zombies [the elderly] into people we need to care about,” Goldman says about Canadian literature.

Canadian writers like Alice Munro tell stories about diseases of memory with an ironic and hopeful view, a perspective that challenges the belief that once you lose your reason and cognition you are no longer at the top of the food chain.

“[Canadian authors] also suggest that when we construct our stories, we all forget things. It’s not a pathological disease, it’s an everyday aspect of constructing a story that we live.”

In the end, it’s all about perspective.

“I don’t mean to minimize the suffering people feel in the face of [Alzheimer’s disease],” says Goldman. “But how we experience that, I think, depends on how we are told to think about it or how we come to think about it.”

Goldman is currently working on a book titled Forgotten, in which she offers close readings of literature to demonstrate that “there is more than one story to tell about dementia and, ultimately, personhood is bigger than just a capacity for rational thought and an ability to store facts in our memory.”