‘People Who Want History Want History’: Experimenting with Temporal, Environmental and Narrative Dislocation in Short Fiction about Dementia

Abstract

This article explores the challenges and possibilities of writing ‘People Who Want History Want History’ – a short story structured around a ‘reminiscence interview’ as part of the induction process in a dementia care home. Told entirely through documents (interview transcripts, excerpts from a staff manual, care home marketing material etc.), the story avoids a fixed narrative perspective, leaving plenty of hermeneutic gaps for readers to grapple with. I reflect on the specific choices I made while writing this story and the way I aimed to draw attention to the power structures of institutional landscapes, the damaging stereotypes around dementia, and narrative expectations of readers. Drawing on other short stories as inspiration, I consider the interesting echoes between the way dementia disrupts narrative, and the suspended temporality of the short story form. In examining and reflecting on this story I attempt to illuminate the way short fiction can draw attention to the troubling and multivalent stories that might emerge when sustained narrative becomes impossible.