ABSTRACT
When Iris Murdoch published her first novel, Under the Net, she was thirty-four. Her prolific output concluded with Jackson’s Dilemma, when she was seventy-six. She was not formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s type dementia until two years later, but Jackson’s Dilemma bears overwhelming evidence of its author’s decline, and she never wrote another novel. It is confronting to have to start our chapter on storytelling in old age with this subject, but I have chosen to do so because Jackson’s Dilemma is a striking example of a story maker whose brain can no longer sustain the capacity for creativity: the nature of that deterioration enables us to see anew some of the key things that make stories work, and in particular, to see what happens when the left hemisphere can no longer play its part in making an individual emotional experience into a viable story.
