Yann Martel

And I thought of my mother who's 85 and has Alzheimer's.

And she's been like that for years.

So I'm familiar with it as a dutiful loving son.

But for the first time I thought of her in terms of as an artist.

What is this loss of memory, this loss of chronology?

How can I respond to it?

Exactly like when I was at the gates of Auschwitz.

Here I'm at the gates of Alzheimer's.

And so what I did is in six weeks, I've never written something so quickly.

I wrote an entire other book.

And it's a novel in 52 chapters that has to be published in a box, a clamshell that will open up.

Because the 52 chapters, same number of weeks in a year, same number of cards in a deck of cards.

Life, in a sense, is a shuffleable thing.

There's not necessarily any order.

It's haphazard and they're unbound.

So you can read it in any order you want.

And each chapter is a sentence, a single sentence.

So one chapter is just one word.

So some are as short as one face of a page, others double, then it's four, eight or 16.

And it's one sentence.