Before we get into the event—I would like to hear from you in what way you think that my love affected you: (verbatim fragments on memory and loss—from a piece that I have been working on my whole adult life and may never write)

Abstract Abstract: Throughout his mother’s decade-long battle with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, Marcus Youssef has used multiple narrative forms to document his experience of his mother’s illness. Using examples of his own writing about her Alzheimer’s, as well as the writing his mother did as the disease took hold, Youssef examines the ways in which his own attempts to construct performance narratives out of the disease’s impact seem remarkably similar to his mother’s own attempts to preserve a sense of narrative (or “self”) in the face of the steady erasure of her memory. Taken together, these fragments of essay, drama, journal and radio broadcast make a kind of patchwork and subjective memory document that catalogues one example of this emerging cultural rite of passage. It also poses fundamental questions about the relationship of narrative to self, and memory’s complicated and elusive role in the formation of both.