In Author's Chair - Penny Bingham

Stories and Stanza

Welcome to Stories and Stanza! I am happy to have you here. Please join me in welcoming Penny Bingham for today's episode.

Penny Bingham is an emerging writer, currently working on a hybrid memoir chronicling her seven years as a carer for her husband, who lived with Lewy body dementia. It is a warts-and-all account of the devastation a dementia diagnosis presents for the person with the disease, the carer and the family. Arising from her comprehensive journal of her husband's illness, the book leads the reader through the pain of watching the decline of a once proud, dignified, vibrant person as toxic proteins attack the brain, unravelling neural connections and giving rise to confusion, agitation, delusions, hallucinations and paranoia that are the hallmarks of this disease.

The book's title, A Gift of Grace, hints at how love flourished in an exquisitely painful experience and how dementia's profound lessons in patience, tolerance, and humility transcended resentment and despair to embrace grace and peace. It encapsulates the confluence of her experience as a carer, knowledge acquired through formal academic study, and stories shared by others she has been privileged to meet through her role as a dementia advocate.

Based on the belief the message is more significant than the narrative and grounded by her academic qualification, the work encompasses theoretical perspectives to inform others navigating the dementia labyrinth of the challenges and frustrations they are destined to encounter. It aims to reduce the stigma surrounding dementia. It challenges readers to re-think their perceptions of what Sally Magnusson, in her memoir, Where Memories Go, describes as 'one of the greatest social, medical, economic, scientific, philosophical and moral challenges of our times'.

Penny's entry, The Other Jenny, was short-listed in the Ada Awards 2021