Life -writing of Alzheimer's disease and quadriplegia: On the cusp of the illness chaos story

TL;DRAbstract

The chaos story is the ineffable experience of illness---what Arthur Frank (1995) artfully describes as a vortex of lost words and slips from objective to subjective time. The coupling of "chaos" with "story" invites us to question not only the form of illness stories, but their very possibility. Drawing on the published life-writings of people with Alzheimer's disease and quadriplegia, as well as the caregivers of people with those conditions, I use literary and cultural theories to argue: (a) The illness chaos story can begin to be heard in stories written on its cusp, in stories of those who anticipate (Alzheimer's disease) or recall (quadriplegia) slipping into the vortex of chaos. (b) Caregiver stories are an under-appreciated yet valuable resource in the study of illness narratives, and of chaos stories, in particular; caregivers witness the embodied testimony of those enduring chaos and help them to sustain their narrative identities. (c) Bodily duress correlates with chaos; whe

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