In 2019, the TV presenter and journalist Fiona Phillips booked a last-minute trip to Vietnam with a friend. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But not only did Phillips not invite her husband or children, she didn’t consult them, instead simply informing them that she was leaving the following week. It was an impulsive decision that she hoped would lift her out of a depressive episode that was manifesting in brain fog and anxiety. But for her husband, TV editor Martin Frizell, it was another instance of Phillips behaving oddly, a sign that things “were not all they should be”.
Remember When chronicles, with illuminating candour, the changes that culminated in Phillips’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2022, at the age of 61. Billed as a memoir by Phillips herself, owing to her decline during the three-year writing process, it’s really a co-production between her, her ghostwriter Alison Phillips (no relation) and Frizell, who provides fitful interjections. As such, it offers a rare account of the impact of Alzheimer’s not just from the person who has it, but from their primary carer too.
