How Was The Party?: A Year living with Alzheimer’s

A bold collection of Blog writings from the theatre writer and performer Laura Bridgeman. With unflinching honesty, Bridgeman records her mother's first signs of the illness and her descent into confusion, ill health and the loss of independent living. Through the frustrations and heart-ache, there is a never a note of self pity. If anything, a magical humanity governs. In Bridgeman's hands, Alzheimer's has never seemed so humorous and real.

"...such a jumble of feelings: fury, fog, lucidity, sadness, laughs, cheeriness, crabbiness, discovery and loss, all dotted with cups of tea. I love Laura’s mixture of brisk, practical, profound and heartbreaking moods: the desolate sorting out of possessions, the revelations and changes in relationship that happen when an adult child has to look after a sick parent, and the moments of humour that save your life. She really does show us why this is ‘the disease the young most fear’." Michele Hanson

""This brave, bold, fragile book brims over with so much humanity it will take your breath away. It did mine. Both harrowing and life-affirming, full of humour and suffering and love, all rendered in devastatingly beautiful prose. Bridgeman's eye for detail cuts to the core of what it means to be human, to be in the world, to be alive, and what that does to us." Jonathan Kemp (London Triptych, Ghosting)