"Memory's barriers are without barriers," writes Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee in the opening of his touching and thoughtful memoir, Your Own Will Leave You. Bhattacharjee eloquently reflects on family, care, and memory as he chronicles his experiences with his elderly mother who suffers from dementia. Working from his journal, Bhattacharjee ruminates on the ways we understand dementia and memory as well as end-of-life issues. He is not only a loving son, but also an Indian with a universal sensibility who turns to ancient and contemporary thinkers that inform his perspective.
Bhattacharjee focuses on the last months of his mother's life and her changing demeanorher stubbornness, humor, and vulnerability. He traces her interactions with family members, neighbors, and caregivers, while also addressing burden-of-care issues. Recounting his moments of grief and guilt with candor, Bhattacharjee also re-evaluates how Western culture prejudices popular perceptions of mental illness.
Lyrical, penetrating, occasionally aphoristic, and full of insights, Your Own Will Leave You is a heartfelt, and at times heartbreaking, memoir and a warm elegy for the author's late mother.
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"There is a poignant contradiction at the heart of a memoir focusing on dementia, whether the beginning of one's own or that of someone close to the writer: Memories are invoked, sometimes provoked, re-cast, detailed, and the writer attempts to, most importantly, find meaning in them, while memory itself fades, evaporates. In Bhattacharjee's Your Own Will Leave You, this apparent duality is intensified by the very nature of his ostensible subject: the 'fading stars of memory' of his source of all memory. The bittersweet sensuality of his childhood; the intensity of his cultural and literary contexts, which run broad and deep; and the will-of-the-wisp attempt to render what has faded in front of him create a rich and forlorn text. 'Did he have a mother?' Edward Dahlberg asks in his own memoir. For Bhattacharjee the achievement is to answer that question with such memorable certainty in the chemtrail of loss." - David Lazar, author of Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a writer, political thinker, and poet, who earned his doctorate in political science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence, Nehru and the Spirit of India, The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown, Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, and Ghalibs Tomb and Other Poems. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, World Literature Today, The Fortnightly Review, The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Outlook, The Wire, Frontline, Scroll, and the Economic and Political Weekly. He has taught lyric poetry and literary journalism at Ambedkar University, New Delhi.
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