Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself

by Jonathan Taylor

Overview

When Jonathan Taylor was eight his father began to act strangely. One day he suddenly couldn't remember his own daughter’s name, and he then began to shake, to drive badly, and to forget who and where he was. Increasingly Jonathan’s father would utter "help, help, help” repeatedly, even if no one was in the room. Doctors diagnosed Parkinson's disease and dementia, and for the next 13 years Jonathan and his family cared for his father. This is the darkly humorous and heart-wrenching story of a son's struggle for recognition from a father transformed mentally and physically by a ruinous disease. Along the way Jonathan attempts to unveil his father's strange and largely secret past, to uncover the man who led a school before he became a trembling sufferer who sometimes mistook his son for Humphrey Bogart or a giraffe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781862079557
Publisher:	Granta UK
Publication date:	07/02/2008
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Taylor is an English professor.

Editorial Reviews

A son's unsentimental attempt to unravel the mysteries of his father's life and come to terms with its contradictions. Taylor, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, began writing this memoir after the death of his father, who for nearly two decades had been suffering from Parkinson's disease and was either unable or unwilling to talk about his past. A few years earlier, the author had discovered that he had a stepbrother, a man whose memories of their father, in his pre-Parkinson's days, were entirely unlike his own. Taylor reconstructs scenes from his childhood and adolescence to show his father's downward spiral-from engaged parent to a man so deep in dementia that he could not distinguish his son from a giraffe and believed he was being kidnapped by enemies. Starting in his teens, Taylor began sharing with his mother the role of caretaker. He admits to being impatient, cross, frustrated and angered by his father's strange behaviors. It was only later when he found clinical names for the symptoms that he could begin to understand what was happening, and with understanding came guilt over his shortcomings as a caretaker. Taylor's frankness in describing his demented father may be seen as an invasion of privacy, but it is clear that he loved him and wanted desperately to know him and understand him, going to great lengths to track down his father's relatives, former teaching colleagues and anyone who might provide helpful memories. While Taylor's father remains something of an enigma to him and to the reader, the unpleasant truths about being a caretaker are made plain, as are the real horrors of witnessing the destruction of a loved one's body, personality, mind and memory.The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before giving to anyone touched by Parkinson's disease.

Kirkus Reviews