Will I love Scar Tissue?

In Scar Tissue, a 1993 Booker Prize finalist, an unnamed narrator gives a first-person account of the precipitous decline of his mother from dementia (though her condition is never explicitly named).

“She remembers captions of New Yorker cartoons,” he says, lamenting that “it is what happened five minutes ago that is slipping away.” It is a predicament with which dementia caregivers are all too familiar.

Yet, despite his mother’s descent into oblivion, the narrator insists she be treated with dignity. “You keep telling me what has been lost,” he tells her neurologist, “and I keep telling you something remains.”