Agile Authorship: Exploring Collaborative Dementia Memoirs through Fanfiction Practices

This article examines how collaborative dementia memoirs can challenge personalised approaches to authorship in impactful ways. Collaborative life writing has traditionally grappled with the complex power dynamics inherent in multi-contributor narratives. Literary disability scholars, in particular, have raised ethical concerns about the possible exploitation and erosion of agency among disabled subjects. As an alternative, we advocate for a paradigm shift aligned with dementia self-advocates’ emphasis on interdependence, drawing on potentially productive concepts of shared authorship found in fanfiction. In fan communities, all fanfiction is perceived as oppositional to the authority of the single author, framing stories as dynamic rather than fixed to one voice. We apply this perspective to Slow Puncture (2020) by Peter Berry and Deb Bunt and Somebody I Used to Know (2018) by Wendy Mitchell with Anna Wharton, where collaboration and interdependence are central to narrating the dementia experience and negotiating both authors’ understandings of the condition, as well as facilitating self- and mutual exploration through creative production. We also propose the concept of “agile authorship” as a means to approach questions of authorship in collaborative memoirs by contributors with and without dementia.