'The Country of My Disease': Genes and Genealogy in Alzheimer's life-writing

The essay explores the ways in which Alzheimer's life-writing negotiates contemporary biomedical discourses on the brain, brain disease, and selfhood, tracing the ways in which emergent genetic and neuro-scientific knowledge is organized and related to the scripting of life narratives – specifically Charles Pierce's account of his family's history of Alzheimer's disease in his memoir, Hard to Forget. The discussion of this text is framed by an engagement with Nikolas Rose and Carl Novas's work on biological citizenship and biosociality as a productive context in which to consider how Pierce explores the relationships between genetic research and genealogy and between biomedical and biographical models of the subject.