Take Me Home | Granta

  • Published: 02/07/2007
  • ISBN: 9781862079557
  • 142x20mm
  • 272 pages

Take Me Home

Jonathan Taylor

When Jonathan Taylor was eight he began to find his father puzzling. The first thing that happened was that his father couldn’t remember Jonathan’s sister’s name. Then he began to shake, to drive badly, to forget who or where he was, and to mistake his son for someone else entirely. ‘Help, help, help, help, help’, his father would say, on and on, but there seemed to be no helping him. Doctors diagnosed Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and Jonathan gradually became one of his father’s carers, taking it in turn with his family to look after him for the next thirteen years. Take Me Home is the story of a son’s struggle for recognition from a father who is being transformed mentally and physically by a ruinous disease, and a writer’s search to discover a father’s strange and largely secret past – who he was before he became a disappointed headmaster in Stoke-on-Trent and, at the last, a trembling Parkinsonian who sometimes mistook his son for Humphrey Bogart or a giraffe.

Very moving and beautifully written

John Bayley

A brave and unsentimental book

Diana Athill

Taylor...is a spirited writer, blessed with an unusually keen sense of curiosity

Guardian

The Author

Jonathan Taylor is author of the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher Crystal Clear Creators. His articles, stories, poems and reviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines including Times Literary Supplement, Guardian Family, Times Higher, Times 2 and many others. He is the author of the books Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing. He is currently completing a novel, Entertaining Strangers.

More about the author →

Jonathan Taylor on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Help, Help, Help

Jonathan Taylor

‘Day in, day out, my father had to watch us smiling and laughing, while he couldn't join.’