Half My Brain Went to Heaven, the Other Lost Car Keys: A funny, moving and unforgettable book about dementia, memory, mediumship, family, friendship love

What if dementia is not disappearance, but a different way of being found?Vivienne Vale has spent her life speaking to the dead.Glamorous, sharp-tongued, secretly psychic and professionally unshockable, she has sat with grieving mothers, wealthy widows, sceptics, social climbers, broken families and the gloriously badly behaved dead. She knows how grief enters a room. She knows how love survives after loss. She knows the dead are very bad at boundaries.Then Vivienne is diagnosed with dementia.Suddenly, the woman who could find everyone else's missing mothers, husbands, secrets and messages begins losing Tuesdays, words, names, drawers, confidence and, occasionally, the potato peeler. As her world changes, Vivienne begins to understand dementia in a way no leaflet ever taught her: not as a simple vanishing, but as a shift in language, time, touch, music, fear and love.With the help of loyal friends, an opinionated dead mother, a suspicious toaster, a ceramic duck called Colin, and what she comes to call The Bright Half, Vivienne starts leaving maps for her future self - and for everyone trying to love someone who is becoming harder to find.Funny, devastating, practical and luminous, Half My Brain Went to Heaven, The Other Half Lost the Car Keys is a wildly original story about dementia, memory, mediumship, friendship, family, grief and the stubborn ways love keeps reaching us.For anyone living with dementia, loving someone through it, caring from the edge of exhaustion, or frightened of what memory loss means, this book offers one unforgettable message: The person is still there. You may simply need to learn the new door.