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Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath (review)

In this review essay, I consider Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass. This book was developed from an approach of personal therapeutic journaling that Dana used as a means to process the time she spent as caregiver for her mother. Dana weaves an autobiographical tale of helping to care for her mother, Alice, as her mother digresses into the hardships and confusions of Alzheimer’s disease. As the title suggests, there is a connection to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Alice, the author’s mother, is on her own trip through Wonderland as a metaphor for Alzheimer’s disease. Readers are presented with vignettes that include both images and text that combine to tell Dana’s story about her mother. The book is a fitting illustration of how autoethnographic or autobiographical research might employ visual methods to attract a reader, enhance a text, and deliver a multi-dimensional product that is an engaging and relevant piece of scholarship, while also being visually and textually accessible. Particularly in the context of art education research, Aliceheimer’s might suggest ways that researchers can combine the personal and visual in their research. My interest in reviewing the book is partly personal. I am an artist-teacher. I began teaching art after learning how to make art. My heart lies with art as my means of visual communication, as words have always been difficult for me to comprehend and process. During my first year teaching high school, an administrator distributed an article entitled “Changing the Hollow Conventions of Academic Writing” (Rankin, 1998) to the faculty and some graduating students. The author charged the reader to reconsider the norms and standard practices of scholarly writing, particularly literature reviews. Many things in my life have changed since 1998, Dana Walrath. Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.