‘A butt of my own jokes’: Terry Pratchett on the disease that finally claimed him

The much-loved author died aged 66 last week, seven years after revealing he had a rare form of dementia. Here we reprint the powerful account of the condition that he wrote to fight the stigma of the illness, first published by the Alzheimer’s Society in 2008

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer’s as an insult, and I decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces that I could against this wretched disease.

I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer’s it’s the best form of Alzheimer’s to have. This is a moot point, but what it does do, while gradually robbing you of your memory, visual acuity and other things you didn’t know you had until you miss them, is leave you more or less fluent and coherent as you have always been.

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