Your Own Will Leave You My Mother's Dementia

"There is a poignant contradiction at the heart of a memoir focusing on dementia, whether the beginning of one's own or that of someone close to the writer: Memories are invoked, sometimes provoked, re-cast, detailed, and the writer attempts to, most importantly, find meaning in them, while memory itself fades, evaporates. In Bhattacharjee's Your Own Will Leave You, this apparent duality is intensified by the very nature of his ostensible subject: the 'fading stars of memory' of his source of all memory. The bittersweet sensuality of his childhood; the intensity of his cultural and literary contexts, which run broad and deep; and the will-of-the-wisp attempt to render what has faded in front of him create a rich and forlorn text. 'Did he have a mother?' Edward Dahlberg asks in his own memoir. For Bhattacharjee the achievement is to answer that question with such memorable certainty in the chemtrail of loss." - David Lazar, author of Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts