Broadcaster Fiona Phillips has detailed her experience of living with Alzheimer's disease in her 2025 memoir, Remember When, describing the condition as 'a nightmare where it's pitch black'.
Phillips, who was diagnosed at the age of 60, wrote openly about her memory loss and her dealings with the NHS. She first experienced months of severe anxiety and brain fog before receiving a diagnosis of young-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2022.
A Personal Battle Shared Publicly
Phillips shared her journey publicly to raise awareness of the condition, which also claimed the lives of her parents and an uncle. In the memoir, she wrote: "Finally, it clicks in place, and I turn it in. I gently push the door open, but then in that very moment. I sense the person I love has disappeared again."
She added: "They're gone. The memory has gone. And I'm all alone. And that's how it is for me living with Alzheimer's."
Reflections on Diagnosis and Family History
Reflecting on the diagnosis, she shared: "I'd just turned 60 when I was diagnosed in early 2022, although it was probably stalking me long before that. I feel now that Alzheimer's had been coming my way secretly, stealthily, creeping into my brain for years. Who knows? Maybe it was within me somewhere since the day I was born, just waiting for the moment to explode in all its awfulness."
Phillips also wrote about the condition affecting her loved ones, adding: "It's always been there. My grandma, mum, dad, my uncle Barry... they were all taken by it. It's like a curse that keeps coming back to claim us."
Living with Memory Loss
Highlighting its effects, the TV star wrote: "Everywhere I look, there are memories, I know they are there ... yet so many of them feel out of my reach now. It's like I stretch out to touch them, to recall the photo shoots I see in the magazines or the moment we took that photograph on the beach by the windbreaks in Dorset, but then just as I'm about to grasp it, the memory skips away from me, and I can't catch up with it."
Phillips likened the feeling to "trying to chase a £5 note on a gusty day," adding: "Each time I think I've caught it, it whips away again and then I'm left frustrated and confused. Or imagine having a nightmare where it's pitch black, and you are desperately searching for someone you love in a house you've never visited before."
Stepping Away from the Spotlight
Phillips has since stepped away from the spotlight, with her last major in-person public appearance in February 2024, when she attended the funeral of Kate Garraway's late husband Derek Draper in London, accompanied by her husband Martin Frizell. Now in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, she has occasionally appeared in brief photos through social media updates shared by Martin.
