Novelist Iris Murdoch died in 1999 after a three-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, writer John Bayley, who wrote movingly of the impact of her illness in
Elegy for Iris
, tells in this book of the final year of his wife's life, when she was visited more by her own imaginary "friends" than by the exigencies of real life. In
Iris and Her Friends
, Bayley recalls his own increasingly precarious hold on reality and subsequent breakdown, Murdoch's final happy weeks in a home for the terminally ill, and finally her quiet death. Although closely linked to
Elegy
,
Iris and Her Friends
focuses more on Bayley's experience of Murdoch's the memories he discovered just as his wife lost her own--of his childhood, his army years and first loves, and of their long marriage. One of Bayley's "friends" is a subject he holds "The old Eng. Lit. again. I taught it for nearly fifty years and feel detached from it now." Nonetheless, literature emerges here as the one remaining constant in his life. Scarcely two pages go by without a reference, almost involuntary, to Hardy, Coleridge, Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Thurber, James, Lawrence, Woolf--or Murdoch. Sometimes Murdoch appears to respond to the shared literary in-jokes, but more often the pair are like "two animals pushing together, nudging and grooming each other, grunting together as they bask in a mutual doze." This is an incredibly intimate glimpse into a personal life, but as Bayley tellingly "There is a surreal sense in which Alzheimer's has turned Iris herself into art. She is my Iris no longer, but a person in the public domain."
--Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk
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