title: Making sense of the stories that people with Alzheimer's tell: a journey with my mother.
abstract: Confabulation or pseudo-reminiscence of the sort produced by people with Alzheimer's is reconsidered by applying existing theories about the structure of narrative and work on reminiscence, and the construction of a life story to the stories told by the author's mother. This approach provides the basis for going beyond a negative estimate of confabulatory stories based on their apparent confusion of past and present, truth and fantasy, to a more positive estimate of them as complying with the norms of narrative, and as being functional for their teller as a means both of interaction and of reconstructing an identity. It also allows for identification of certain predominant themes, which may help one to grasp the general sense of such stories.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Crisp
mesh_terms: D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000451:nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D001325:Autobiographies as Topic; D008192:Deception; D005190:Family / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D012649:Self Concept