Monsieur T stabbed his wife five times with a kitchen knife. After the police arrive and to take him away under interrogation Mr T says he does not know why he did it. After this short first chapter the following chapter is an interrogation of a quite different kind: a test for someone who might be suffering from Alzheimer's disease. This is a short book dealing with issues of caring for somebody with Alzheimers and the effects on those who suffer its consequences. It is written as a novel and its short jerky chapters imitate perhaps the actions and thoughts of sufferers and carers.

Chapters that reflect the repetitious thoughts of Mt T are interspersed with a short history of the discovery of the disease and the medical effects on sufferers, but they are written in simple chatty format that are interesting rather than informative. There are also thoughts expressed by the wife and family of Mr T. and questions for the reader set apart on otherwise blank pages for example:

An exercise for you
Imagine that you can erase from your memory a person close to you with all those events in which you were involved. Who would you chose?

Questions like this are designed to demonstrate to the reader what it might be like for Alzheimer victims. The book lightly touches on the events in Mr T's family life with some thoughts that the disease can be hereditary and how family members (Mr T had three daughters) may react to this information. The most affecting chapters are those focusing on the carers: in this case Mr T's second wife; she feels like a prisoner locked in the house with her husband who fails to recognise her.

The book will not be much comfort for anybody caring for a victim of Alzheimers, but it may enlighten those who have no direct experience of it. I cared for an aunt who was a sufferer and the book reflects some of the issues involved. There is a test that you can do online which I hastily took just to be sure, it did lead me to think on the risks of entering a relationship later in life, however Alzheimers might be the least of ones concerns. I thought the fragmented style of the book was effective and so 4 stars. ( )

An interesting piece of essay/fiction, WNHtD is primarily about a man suffering from Alzheimer's disease, who stabs his wife five times before being institutionalized. In very French fashion, we get a lot of worrying about personal identity, subjectivity and so on, but Rosenthal does it nicely--this is not just slightly artified theory. But it's mainly interesting for the form. This is, in no way, narrative fiction. We follow the biography of Alzheimer himself; the history of the disease; the story of the stabbing man; and Rosenthal's reflections on her own family, her fears about the disease, and the difficulties she has in writing this book. This mix of essay, memoir, history and fiction is very popular in America at present, which makes it almost inconceivable to me that it has found so few readers so far.

The book does have flaws: although its mimicry of the disconnection and forgetting associated with Alzheimer's is impressive to begin with, it gets pretty dull by the end. There are also more than a few typos. Hopefully a second printing will give the editors a chance to fix those up. But despite this, highly recommended.

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