This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-dress

Spectator. And this week, I'm joined by the writer Nikki Gerard, whose new book is called

What Dementia teaches us about love.

Nikki, welcome.

I'm very pleased to be here.

I want to just start by asking, I mean, the book obviously describes, and its starting

point is your own experience of losing your father to dementia.

What was it that impelled you in the aftermath of that to say, you know, there's something

here, this needs to be a book, this isn't a personal experience, there's more to it, because it's much more than a memoir,

it's not simply an account of your own experience, it's a sort of investigation, you know,

you're doing journalism here.

Absolutely, it's much more than a memoir.

And there are lots of wonderful memoirs, and I didn't want to write one of those, partly because there are so many and partly because my father was a private

man and I only wanted to go so far in exposing him. As you say, my father lived with dementia

and then he died of dementia and actually it was his dying. It was the last nine months that

he spent lying in a hospital bed in a little room downstairs

in the family home that made me have to think more about dementia and what it means.

Because, I mean, as I say in the book, I always had thought that we're made of our memories.

But then what happens when we lose our memories,

are we then unmade? And I'd always thought that what I valued most in myself and in other people was kind of autonomy and agency and purpose and self-sufficiency standing on our own ground.

But then all these people, like my poor father at the end of his life,

...