Losing the Plot: D is for Dementia
Kate Sissons

A daughter, estranged from her mother for a decade, is called back by a single telephone call. She finds her once-glamorous mother living alone in an Oxfordshire cottage gone to ruin, with cats, chickens and a fridge of rotting food. Several years later the diagnosis is Alzheimer's dementia. The caring falls to Kate.

Her mother comes to France for a holiday and stays nearly a year, through blood transfusions, a shattered pelvis and lockdown on a French mountain. In that year the two find each other and live a happy life. There are hard nights too, on trolleys in freezing hospital corridors, where Kate refuses to leave a mother who has dementia and speaks no French.

Losing the Plot is a happy memoir of love, loss and caring, written for the families who do the caring. It is full of hard practical knowledge, and it is funny: a mother outraged at the pickpockets of Venice, and a lifelong Guardian reader caught stealing the care home's Daily Mail every morning. Kate's films of her mother went viral and have been watched hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok at Losing the Plot. One video alone has had over 182,000 views.

Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, as President of Alzheimer's Research UK, has agreed to write the foreword. Kate is donating a percentage of royalties to Alzheimer's Research UK. It is what her mother would have wanted.

Her mother was the child sent across the Atlantic in Standing Room Only.