Making sense of the stories that people with Alzheimer's tell: a journey with my mother.

Confabulation or pseudo-reminiscence of the sort produced by people with Alzheimer's is reconsidered by applying existing theories about the structure of narrative and work on reminiscence, and the construction of a life story to the stories told by the author's mother. This approach provides the basis for going beyond a negative estimate of confabulatory stories based on their apparent confusion of past and present, truth and fantasy, to a more positive estimate of them as complying with the norms of narrative, and as being functional for their teller as a means both of interaction and of reconstructing an identity. It also allows for identification of certain predominant themes, which may help one to grasp the general sense of such stories.