Forever Today

by Deborah Wearing
Transworld UK
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Publisher: Doubleday UK, January 2005
Trade Paperback, 329 pages


Rights sold:
House of Books (Dutch);
Sperling & Kupfer (Italian);
Goldmann (German);
RH Kodansha (Japan)

’This is a harrowing, haunting and heartening book - a loss-story which is also a love story. It takes us deep inside the question of what it means to be human.’ ANDREW MOTION (Poet Laureate)

Clive Wearing has one of the most extreme cases of amnesia ever known. In 1985, a virus completely destroyed a part of his brain essential for memory, leaving him trapped in a limbo of the constant present. Every conscious moment is for him as if he has just come round from a long coma, an endlessly repeating loop of awakening. A brilliant conductor and BBC music producer, Clive was at the height of his success when the illness struck. As damaged as Clive was, the musical part of his brain seemed unaffected, as was his passionate love for Deborah, his wife.
For seven years he was kept in the London hospital where the ambulance first dropped him off, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Deborah desperately searched for treatments and campaigned for better care. After Clive was finally established in a new special hospital, she fled to America to start her life over again. But when she tried to build new relationships, she found she could never love another the way she loved Clive. Then, in their regular transatlantic phone calls, she noticed Clive’s memory unaccountably beginning to improve, ten years after the illness first struck. She returned to England. Today, although Clive still lives in care, and still has the worst case of amnesia in the world, he continues to improve. They renewed their marriage vows in 2002. This is the story of a life lived outside time, a story that questions and redefines the essence of what it means to be human. It is also the story of a marriage, of a bond that runs deeper than conscious thought.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Deborah Wearing campaigned for ten years for special medical services for the brain-damaged, and founded The Amnesia Association. She now combines writing with her work as an administrator for Britain’s National Health Service.

Quotes and reviews:
’An extraordinary real-life story about the love of one woman for a man who is forever trapped in a tiny bubble of time ... Deborah’s heartfelt testimony is some small relief.’
Richard Madeley Daily Express

’She shows herself to be a remarkable, resilient and resourceful woman ... At times the misery seems overwhelming - you can’t read this book without crying - but it is never mawkish. The prose appears almost effortless.’
Sunday Times

’A harrowing story of a human tragedy ... A heart rending love story.’ JACK ASHLEY (Rt. Hon. Lord Ashley of Stoke)
’Delivers a message of hope about human identity. It is similar to the moral drawn by John Bayley after his wife, Irish Murdoch, was struck down by Alzheimer’s and it is this: ’Clive was living evidence that you could lost almost everything you ever knew about yourself and still be yourself.’
Mail on Sunday

’Deeply extraordinary and moving.’
Oliver Sacks

’Compelling, poignant and exquisitely written ... The most dramatic description of ’the abyss of non-being’ since Oliver Sacks’ AWAKENINGS.’ MARJORIE WALLACE, founder of SANE

’Riveting but unbearably sad.’
Jewish Chronicle

‘A remarkable book: absorbing, moving and humbling.’ FAY WELDON

’Overwhelmingly moving...Her harrowing book is a description of utterly unselfish love. It also raises scary questions about what exactly makes us human.’
Val Hennessy Daily Mail

‘Loving, terrifying and often extremely funny ... astonishing.’ DEBORAH MOGGACH

’Intriguing, moving account of a descent into the abyss of amnesia. We confront deep mysteries on the way - What are we?’ PAUL BROKS, author of INTO THE SILENT LAND

’An extraordinary story of constancy in love, and Deborah Wearing tells in brilliantly.’
Evening Standard
http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/catalog/author.htm?authorID=4804

THE ETERNAL NOW
Rosie Jackson on a search for lost time.
Forever Today
Deborah Wearing
Doubleday, UK, 2004, £10.99
I REMEMBER WELL the shock and heartache I felt in the early 1980s, visiting a friend who had suffered a devastating memory loss. Gay Clifford, my close mentor at university, was a specialist in medieval literature, yet as I sat with her in her parents’ home, it was hard to believe she was the same person. A sudden brain haemorrhage had not only washed away her daunting intelligence and exuberant beauty; but it had also drowned much of her memory. Gay still read avidly, but now the words landed like snow on a warm sleeve. By the time she turned the page, everything there had already melted away.
Such a moving recollection made it especially poignant to read this account of the trauma experienced by Deborah and Clive Wearing, for Clive suffered what is possibly the most acute case of amnesia ever known. They met in London in September 1978, when Clive conducted a choir in which Deborah was singing. An Early Music producer for BBC Radio 3, as well as director of the London Lassus Ensemble and choirmaster of the London Sinfonietta, Clive had a growing reputation as a brilliant conductor and musician. With their shared passion for early music, soon he and Deborah were inseparable, marrying in 1983. The world seemed to lie before them, but in March 1985 illness struck in the form of a virus, herpes simplex. Usually the culprit behind little more than cold sores, in rare cases herpes can penetrate and injure the brain. By the time Clive’s illness was correctly diagnosed, the virus had crept into the hippocampus where memory is stored, and left only scars.
From then until now, Clive has remained totally deprived of sequential time or conscious memory. His wife calls him "the man who fell out of time, condemned to repeat forever one constantly changing but - without memory - meaningless moment of time". Stuck in one instant of being, he is unable to get a purchase on the world, "unable to live in continuum, to move through from one moment to the next". Ironically, though, Clive lost none of his fierce, alert intelligence, and much of it became devoted to trying to fathom a way out of this extraordinary prison. The diary he kept contains repeated heart-rending entries of his attempts to understand and re-engage with time.
Because he couldn’t remember, every moment seemed to be the first he had been conscious of. "4.30 pm COMPLETELY AWAKE FIRST TIME. 4.33 pm TRULY AWAKE FIRST TIME. 4.35 pm SUPERLATIVELY AWAKE FIRST TIME", and so on, an endless catalogue of tantalisingly short-lived and deceptive ’awakenings’. Spiritual wisdom might urge us to forgo attachment to both past and future, but such enforced occupation of a never-ending present is only a cruel pastiche of that idea, a human travesty and tragedy in its literal enacting of an eternal now.
What’s remarkable about this book, though, is not only its dramatic story, but the grace, passion and lightness of Deborah Wearing’s narrative. Needless to say, no-one with such severe memory loss can tell their own story, but Forever Today is the closest thing to a personal account. From the way Deborah evokes, explains, imagines, identifies and empathises with her husband’s harrowing plight, she could be his amanuensis.
In so far as words and chronology permit, she conveys the inner experience of memory loss. Yet it is not all gloom. For all his forgetting, Clive never lost two things: his ability to play music, and his deep love for Deborah. Nor is the story static. Clive seems to have moved from inevitable frustration towards some kind of acceptance of his extraordinary fate. "Though his stump of memory never allowed progression from first moment to sustained time, his acute intelligence, applied to the shallow traces of implicit learning he had, let him understand something of his situation, enough to help him relate to others and engage in activities without constantly shouting to be let out of his amnesia."
But this is also Deborah’s story, the story of her transformation into an activist on behalf of the brain-injured - her faith strengthened rather than diminished. In 1986 she brought Clive’s case into the limelight in Jonathan Miller’s acclaimed TV documentary for Channel 4; and in its wake she helped establish a national charity, AMNASS, the Amnesia Association, whose first chairman was Gay Clifford’s father, Freddie. She taught herself medical facts and legal fortunes around acquired brain injury, attended international conferences, and fought for proper rehabilitation care for Clive. "What had happened had turned me into a kind of lioness - I had to defend him with a ferocity I didn’t know I had in me. I forgot to be shy." Urged to leave and start a new life, she did divorce him, but in 2003 they remarried, although of necessity they still live apart. Theirs is a tale of love triumphant over time - and its loss.
This is a compelling book, full of wisdom, frankness, humour and compassion. It will highlight the need for better public funding for those with brain injury, and make us ponder more on the profound relationship between identity, consciousness and memory. It certainly stopped me being complacent about the two simple words with which I started this piece: ’I remember…’ Now they incite huge gratitude.
Rosie Jackson is author of Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion and Mothers Who Leave. She runs workshops on writing and creativity.
http://www.resurgence.org/bookshelf/jackson0405.htm


Sunday January 23, 2005
The Observer

Now Deborah, a communications officer for the NHS, has written a book about Clive’s illness: Forever Today. More than an informative guide for the thousands of carers for brain-injury survivors, it’s an eloquent biography of a man who was once a world expert on early music and an inspiring, if formidable, conductor. Most of all, it’s a portrait of a remarkable and enduring relationship.
She wrote it, she says, ’in bed, instead of sleeping’. And, although this is left unspoken, one presumes to fill the gap her husband used to fill. ’I was trying to figure out what happened to us. Who are we? What does this mean to us? Where do we go from here? The anguish had to come out somewhere. I also felt that what had happened to Clive wasn’t being properly communicated. Not in medical records or neuro-psychological tests. They could say how amnesiac he was, but I was always left saying, "Yes, but what else?"’
We are all the sum of our memories, both recent and long ago. They are what make us who we used to be, who we are, who we become. The ancient Greeks understood. They had two rivers in Hades: Mnemosyne and Lethe, memory and oblivion. Our collective memories remind us that we’re bound together.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1394684,00.html