An elegant woman enjoys a gin and tonic and dinner with her husband in a cosy Italian restaurant near their Greenwich Village apartment; their relaxed, lighthearted conversation, long familiar to them, doesn’t miss a beat. But as the time to leave this regular date draws near, he bids her farewell and she, in practised response, surreptitiously changes her dressy shoes to trainers so that she can rush home to arrive before he does. Once there, their dinner will be entirely forgotten to him and, in a painful reversal of their previous intimacy, he will ask her to leave – in the past he has evicted her to spend the night in the hallway or even called the police. He will not believe that they are married, and will react to evidence to the contrary – their shared belongings, anecdotes of their life together – as though it were planted or invented, a rotten fraud being perpetrated on him.
In Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Dasha Kiper, a clinical psychologist who works with caregivers to people suffering from dementia, is primarily focused on Elizabeth, the wife; what this form of apparent rejection means to her, and how she is able – or not – to negotiate it. There is no story in this book that is not equally heartbreaking: whether it is quotidian, as in the mother who repeatedly removes items from the freezer despite her daughter’s dogged attempts to stop her with entreaties or taped-up instructions; or whether it is comparatively elaborate, as in the elderly woman who befriends the dead authors in photographs on the books she loves, going so far as to invite Stefan Zweig for dinner and ignoring her husband as she attempts, with no outward sign of success, to make conversation with him.
