There’s a moment in my debut novel, The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them), when the protagonist, twelve-year-old Nyla, sits down to read with her grandmother. Grandma – very much the star of the novel, and a gem of my heart – has Alzheimer’s, a condition which Nyla understands as ‘time travel’: it’s not that Grandma is confused when she thinks it’s 1980, and Nyla know it’s 2023, but rather that her memory magic has taken her to another time, another place.
But in that moment that Nyla and Grandma read together, Nyla’s voice growing bright with joy as she reads poetry, and Grandma singing the lines back in response, they find themselves in exactly the same time, on exactly the same page.
Care sits so much at the heart of The Stories Grandma Forgot, from the practical to the poetic: Nyla’s mum sat at the kitchen table, trying to figure out how to navigate the financial cost of care and honouring a loved one’s wishes, Nyla handing Grandma her toothbrush, reminding her to brush her teeth, the care of a librarian recommending Nyla books that celebrate mixed identities like hers, and the big heart of one of Nyla’s caring best friends who always wants to do the right thing. Care was at the heart of my reasons for writing it: the love for my grandmother, and my own families’ journey navigating care for her on her time-traveller journey.
Scottish Book Trust is fundraising to support their caring too, in a manner very similar to Nyla and Grandma’s favourite activity, in their brilliant Reading is Caring programme.
Started in 2020, Reading is Caring uses shared reading to support people living with dementia and their carers. They deliver free one-to-one and small group training sessions to people who care for someone with dementia – be it family members (like Mum and Nyla) or professional carers (like Grandma’s carer, Maria, with bright green hair that Grandma cheekily likens to seaweed).
This training lets participants create personalised, shared and sensory reading experiences to share with people living with dementia, with the aim to help spark memories, relieve stress and distress and, importantly, to help them maintain the relationship they have, to bring them – just like Grandma and Nyla – back into the same space, onto the same page.
It’s that presence, that connectedness – of being taken perhaps out of time completely, while at the same time being totally in the moment and the story – that leaps out in feedback from people who have participated in it, and which perhaps captures the magic of reading itself: ‘It was as if when we read together, she was lost with me in the story…’ ‘To be able to sit and spend time with your partner, engaged in an activity like any other couple is just lovely.’ ‘This was such a fantastic course and has given me an opportunity to spend lovely times with my mum rather than being anxious about what to do to help...’
I didn’t read to my grandmother – I didn’t know to. If I had, I think I would have cherished those moments sat with her. I have, however, written to her: in every page of The Stories Grandma Forgot, and in my poetry long before. When I told her that I had written about her, on a grey time-travel day, she said it ‘made the sun come out’. I’ve very much tried, in every word of The Stories Grandma Forgot, to make the sun come out not only for her, but for readers, too: for young readers to see themselves in Nyla, and for adults to connect with the story of the novel and everything its characters journey through.
The fundraising ask for Reading is Care is simple: to be able to expand across Scotland, to help more people, and share more stories. You can help support this in a number of ways, by donating to Scottish Book Trust, but also by talking about Reading is Caring, and making others aware that it exists. Both might inspire people who need it to find out more about getting involved, and in turn might encourage more people to support its expansion.
And, of course, if you’d like to meet Nyla and her grandma, then you know where to find them: nestled in the pages of The Stories Grandma Forgot, waiting for you to read their story.
• Support Reading is Caring by donating at scottishbooktrust.com/donate
• The Stories Grandma Forgot (and How I Found Them) by Nadine Aisha Jassat is out now.
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