Press Release: Keeper by Andrea Gillies
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Caroline Sill
212-782-8943
** NOW AVAILABLE IN THE U.S., THE WINNER OF THE PRESTIGIOUS ORWELL PRIZE IN THE U.K. FOR KEEPER **
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KEEPER One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer’s By ANDREA GILLIES |
“Forthright, smartly researched, and warmly recounted. . . . Gillies writes with a novelist’s eye for detail, and her unflinching rendering of Nancy’s excruciating loss of self is skillfully and tenderly drawn. . . . An invaluable resource.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The key to Gillies’s personal strength resides in the numerous literary and philosophical observations she frequently quotes and from which she draws inspiration in this awesome chronicle.” —Booklist (starred review)
“With an economy of expression, an eye for detail, and a storyteller’s knack for dialogue, Gillies charts Nancy’s terrible course from doddering to vicious and her own decline into caregiver dementia. . . . An unvarnished cautionary tale.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
According to the Alzheimer’s Association 2010 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report, there are more than five million Americans currently living with Alzheimer’s and as many as ten million unpaid family caregivers.
Andrea Gillies is a woman who knows firsthand what it is to be a caregiver to someone suffering from this memory robbing disease. Three years ago she and her husband, Chris, and their three children moved to a big Victorian house on a remote peninsula in northern Scotland because they needed a home spacious enough to allow Chris’s parents to move in and be cared for full-time by Andrea, who worked from home as a writer. Nancy and Morris, Andrea’s in-laws, were both ailing but it was Nancy’s Alzheimer’s disease (coupled with her feisty spirit) that demanded around the clock supervision.
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KEEPER: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer’s (Broadway Books; On Sale: August 17, 2010; Hardcover; $25.00) by Andrea Gillies, winner of the 2010 Orwell Prize and the 2009 Wellcome Trust Book Prize in Britain (for the best book on a medical topic), describes the challenging journey that Andrea takes on with Nancy, a woman who over the course of the book slowly loses her grasp on reality. Written with uncommon sensitivity, candor, and insight (as well as flashes of dark humor), KEEPER creates an indelible portrait of the fears, frustrations, rage, guilt, and isolation that are part and parcel of caring for someone with dementia.
As coping with Nancy’s disease became more difficult, and caregiver depression began to creep up on Andrea, she started researching dementia, its history, and well-known people who’ve had it and how it impacted their lives. What she discovered, both from her research and her everyday encounters with Nancy, is that Alzheimer’s most pernicious quality is that it robs a person of their fundamental essence. The loss of memory is, in effect, the loss of one’s very self, thereby rendering Alzheimer’s perhaps the most dehumanizing of any disease that can befall us.
KEEPER is a fiercely honest glimpse into the dementia abyss—an endlessly engrossing meditation on memory and the mind, on family, and on a society that is largely indifferent to the far-reaching ravages of this baffling disease.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrea Gillies is a newspaper columnist in the United Kingdom. Keeper, her first book, has been praised in the British press for its “accessible literary style and its balanced elucidation of both the science of Alzheimer’s disease and the toll it takes on sufferers and carers alike.” The Times Literary Supplement called it “a relevant and important book . . . required reading for carers caught up in the tidal wave of dementia coming our way.” Gillies lives in Scotland with her family and is now writing a novel.
KEEPER
One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer’s
By Andrea Gillies
Published by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Hardcover; $25.00; 336 pages
ISBN 978-0-307-71911-9
For more information about KEEPER or to schedule an interview with
Andrea Gillies, please contact Caroline Sill at 212-782-8943 or csill@randomhouse.com.
**PLEASE SEND A TEARSHEET OF ANY REVIEW OR MENTION**
