A bait and switch.
Several years ago (in 2013, according to the preface), I read a few online articles by Gerda Saunders, a 60-year-old academic who had been diagnosed with dementia. The articles presented a view of oncoming dementia from the inside by an articulate woman. I expected Memory's Last Breath to be an expansion of those articles, but it is not, despite its subtitle "Field Notes on My Dementia." Rather, it is Saunders' memoir interspersed with notes from her reading neuroscience literature. She relates incidents when her memory lapses caused a complication, but I didn't find anything new or insightful about the experience of living with dementia.
Saunders has lived a fairly ordinary life, except for the exoticism of growing up in South Africa. For the most part she tells the kinds of stories you'd hear from friends over coffee: the family farm, meeting her husband, emigrating to Salt Lake City, diets she has tried over the years, how lovely her grandkids are. Her narrative voice occasionally reveals a quirk in her personality, such as this tidbit from when an attacker struck her mother in the head with an axe(!):
Some of us siblings dropped our lives and carpooled or flew across the seven hundred miles to [the town of] George. I was not among them -- and not because I was too busy. With three of my siblings already on their way, I decided to save the trip.
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