ABSTRACT
This chapter resists the idea that dementia patients lose their creativity. It understands creativity to be a way to negotiate cognitive decline, seeing it expressed in how patients construct continuity in the biographical disruption caused by their diagnosis; patients’ narrative choices which acknowledge their cognitive challenge but assert their identity and selfhood throughout; the ways in which patients negotiate with science and scientific discourse related to dementia. Terry Pratchett’s documentary is in certain ways characteristic of the creativity of dementia patients: it critically reflects on cognitive decline but remains positive, and this positivity is foregrounded through the skilful editing and presenting of materials in the documentary. This distancing method works as a model for the way in which Pratchett appears to confront cognitive challenge throughout the documentary. To create lifetime continuity Terry Pratchett gives up the book as the medium of a lifetime, while DeBaggio returns to the medium he craved all his life.
