When Alzheimer's disease had completely taken over my mother, she still remembered in her own way the years she served as a corrections officer in the women’s prisons of Avérof and Korydallos. She may not have remembered who I was, where she lived, or what time it was, but she often mentioned, by their first names, dozens of female inmates, both criminal and political, with whom she had interacted. And as she relived “the years of duty” as a guard, I was inevitably reliving them too, as my childhood had been marked by successive visits to “mom's work.”

Our shared journey to her unavoidable end, the delirious monologues, and our daily dialogues, through the distorting lens of the disease, were preserved in two densely filled notebooks. Now, I don't know if they constitute a confession disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as an autobiographical confession.

N.D.