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The Story of My Father
In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father, James Nichols, once a truly vital man, as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Beginning an intensely personal journey, she recalls the bitter irony of watching this church historian wrestle with his increasingly befuddled notion of time and meaning. She details the struggles with doctors, her own choices, and the attempt to find a caring response to a disease whose special cruelty is to diminish the humanity of those it strikes. In luminous prose, Sue Miller has fashioned a compassionate inventory of two lives, a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
Sue Miller
56 books874 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Sue Miller is an American novelist and short story writer who has authored a number of best-selling novels. Her duties as a single mother left her with little time to write for many years, and as a result she did not publish her first novel until 1986, after spending almost a decade in various fellowships and teaching positions. Since then, two of her novels have been made into feature films, and her book While I Was Gone was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2000.
Sue Miller is an American novelist and short story writer who has authored a number of best-selling novels. Her duties as a single mother left her with little time to write for many years, and as a result she did not publish her first novel until 1986, after spending almost a decade in various fellowships and teaching positions. Since then, two of her novels have been made into feature films, and her book While I Was Gone was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2000.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
June 18, 2023
I followed up my third Sue Miller novel, The Lake Shore Limited, with her only work of nonfiction, a short memoir about her father’s decline with Alzheimer’s and eventual death. James Nichols was an ordained minister and church historian who had been a professor or dean at several of the USA’s most elite universities. The first sign that something was wrong was when, one morning in June 1986, she got a call from police in western Massachusetts who had found him wandering around disoriented and knocking at people’s doors at 3 a.m. On the road and in her house after she picked him up, he described vivid visual delusions. He still had the capacity to smile “ruefully” and reply, when Miller explained what had happened and how his experience differed from reality, “Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.”
Until his death five years later, she was the primary person concerned with his wellbeing. She doesn’t say much about her siblings, but there’s a hint of bitterness that the burden fell to her. “Throughout my father’s disease, I struggled with myself to come up with the helpful response, the loving response, the ethical response,” she writes. “I wanted to give him as much of myself as I could. But I also wanted, of course, to have my own life. I wanted, for instance to be able to work productively.” She had only recently found success with fiction in her forties and published two novels before her father died; she dedicated the second to him, but too late for him to understand the honor. Her main comfort was that he never stopped being able to recognize her when she came to visit.
Although the book moves inexorably towards a death, Miller lightens it with many warm and admiring stories from her father’s past. Acknowledging that she’ll never be able to convey the whole of his personality, she still manages to give a clear sense of who he was, and the trajectory of his illness, all within 170 pages. The sudden death of her mother, a flamboyant lyric poet, at age 60 of a heart attack, is a counterbalance as well as a potential contributing factor to his slow fading as each ability was cruelly taken from him: living alone, reading, going outside for walks, sleeping unfettered.
Sutton Hill, the nursing home where he lived out his final years, did not have a dedicated dementia ward, and Miller regrets that he did not receive the specialist care he needed. “I think this is the hardest lesson about Alzheimer’s disease for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease. Hard because what we feel anyway is that we have never done enough. We blame ourselves. We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.” She conceived of this book as a way of giving her father back his dignity and making a coherent story out of what, while she was living through it, felt like a chaotic disaster. “I would snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer’s disease.”
And in the midst of it all, there were still humorous moments. Her poor father fell in love with his private nurse, Marlene, and believed he was married to her. Awful as it was, there was also comedy in an extended family story Miller tells, one I think I’m unlikely to forget: They had always vacationed in New Hampshire rental homes, and when her father learned one of the opulent ‘cottages’ was coming up for sale, he agreed to buy it sight unseen. The seller was a hoarder … of cats. Eighty of them. He had given up cleaning up after them long ago. When they went to view the house her father had already dropped $30,000 on, it was a horror. Every floor was covered inches deep in calcified feces. It took her family an entire summer to clean the place and make it even minimally habitable. Only afterwards could she appreciate the incident as an early sign of her father’s impaired decision making.
I’ve read a fair few dementia-themed memoirs now. As people live longer, this suite of conditions is only going to become more common; if it hasn’t affected one of your own loved ones, you likely have a friend or neighbor who has had it in their family. This reminded me of other clear-eyed, compassionate yet wry accounts I’ve read by daughter-caregivers Elizabeth Hay (All Things Consoled) and Maya Shanbhag Lang (What We Carry). It was just right as a pre-Father’s Day read, and a novelty for fans of Miller’s novels.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Until his death five years later, she was the primary person concerned with his wellbeing. She doesn’t say much about her siblings, but there’s a hint of bitterness that the burden fell to her. “Throughout my father’s disease, I struggled with myself to come up with the helpful response, the loving response, the ethical response,” she writes. “I wanted to give him as much of myself as I could. But I also wanted, of course, to have my own life. I wanted, for instance to be able to work productively.” She had only recently found success with fiction in her forties and published two novels before her father died; she dedicated the second to him, but too late for him to understand the honor. Her main comfort was that he never stopped being able to recognize her when she came to visit.
Although the book moves inexorably towards a death, Miller lightens it with many warm and admiring stories from her father’s past. Acknowledging that she’ll never be able to convey the whole of his personality, she still manages to give a clear sense of who he was, and the trajectory of his illness, all within 170 pages. The sudden death of her mother, a flamboyant lyric poet, at age 60 of a heart attack, is a counterbalance as well as a potential contributing factor to his slow fading as each ability was cruelly taken from him: living alone, reading, going outside for walks, sleeping unfettered.
Sutton Hill, the nursing home where he lived out his final years, did not have a dedicated dementia ward, and Miller regrets that he did not receive the specialist care he needed. “I think this is the hardest lesson about Alzheimer’s disease for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease. Hard because what we feel anyway is that we have never done enough. We blame ourselves. We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.” She conceived of this book as a way of giving her father back his dignity and making a coherent story out of what, while she was living through it, felt like a chaotic disaster. “I would snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer’s disease.”
And in the midst of it all, there were still humorous moments. Her poor father fell in love with his private nurse, Marlene, and believed he was married to her. Awful as it was, there was also comedy in an extended family story Miller tells, one I think I’m unlikely to forget: They had always vacationed in New Hampshire rental homes, and when her father learned one of the opulent ‘cottages’ was coming up for sale, he agreed to buy it sight unseen. The seller was a hoarder … of cats. Eighty of them. He had given up cleaning up after them long ago. When they went to view the house her father had already dropped $30,000 on, it was a horror. Every floor was covered inches deep in calcified feces. It took her family an entire summer to clean the place and make it even minimally habitable. Only afterwards could she appreciate the incident as an early sign of her father’s impaired decision making.
I’ve read a fair few dementia-themed memoirs now. As people live longer, this suite of conditions is only going to become more common; if it hasn’t affected one of your own loved ones, you likely have a friend or neighbor who has had it in their family. This reminded me of other clear-eyed, compassionate yet wry accounts I’ve read by daughter-caregivers Elizabeth Hay (All Things Consoled) and Maya Shanbhag Lang (What We Carry). It was just right as a pre-Father’s Day read, and a novelty for fans of Miller’s novels.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
March 9, 2013
This is the novelist Sue Miller's account of her father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease and his eventual death. But it is also about Miller's relationship with him before he became ill, and about her relationship with her mother, who predeceased him by many years (she died of a heart attack at age 60). The book is incredibly introspective, and while that's not unusual for a memoir, what I really appreciated about this one was Miller's focus on how and why she wrote the memoir in the first place, the process of revising the events and her feelings about them that come about when writing her own life. The fact that I like Miller's fiction a lot and that I am also a sucker for pretty much any memoir about death made this one a winner for me.
I just loved how forthright Miller was about her feelings throughout: how conflicted she was about his death (he had been suffering from dementia for some time) and her own motives in writing about the entire process in the first place. I would put this on the shelf right alongside Patchett's Truth and Beauty, Hobbie's Being Brett, and Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home, all of which also beautifully describe the death of someone close to the writer. (Don't even get me started on all the ways I will exclude Didion's insanely overhyped Year of Magical Thinking from that same shelf.)
I just loved how forthright Miller was about her feelings throughout: how conflicted she was about his death (he had been suffering from dementia for some time) and her own motives in writing about the entire process in the first place. I would put this on the shelf right alongside Patchett's Truth and Beauty, Hobbie's Being Brett, and Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home, all of which also beautifully describe the death of someone close to the writer. (Don't even get me started on all the ways I will exclude Didion's insanely overhyped Year of Magical Thinking from that same shelf.)
May 13, 2012
I admire this memoir especially for its ending, the insights Sue Miller developed as she completed the third and final draft of this, her only book-length work of non-fiction. Throughout, it is a sensitive portrait of her father and all that made him uniquely himself. His decline into Alzheimer's and his death are terrifying but finally not terrible. Everyone would wish to be remembered with as much clarity and love.
October 10, 2019
A daughter tells, in heartbreaking detail, of the rapid decline and eventual death of her Father due to Alzheimer's disease.
Highly recommended to anyone who is currently caring for someone with this dreadful disease or has done so in the past.
Highly recommended to anyone who is currently caring for someone with this dreadful disease or has done so in the past.
April 8, 2009
I read this after burying my own father, who also had Alzheimer's Disease. It was a great comfort.
July 21, 2008
I've really enjoyed Sue Miller's fiction and had high hopes for this one. I'm sad to say it fell flat for me. The whole book felt like it kept starting and stopping, and she spent so much time explaining to the reader what the memoir was going to be about, or not be about. The book felt really self-conscious and self-indulgent (and yes, I do feel like a horrible person for saying that about a book describing her father's decline into Alzheimer's, but there you have it). It occurs to me that perhaps the disjointed, stuttering nature of the book is intentional, as a way to bring the reader closer to how Miller felt going through the experience. Maybe that was the case, but it made this reader feel disconnected and annoyed, rather than what I imagine was the intention.
November 20, 2012
This is Sue Miller's memoir of her father and their journey through Alzheimer's. Not an easy read; however, her writing style and the insights she learned through her research into this epidemic that seems to have touched everyone in some manner, was a very compelling read.
The Story of My Father is written with such a feel for Sue Miller's compelling need to share her father's journey, but also and maybe even more so, to learn more about who her father was as she wrote about losing "who" he was through this hellish disease. I have read several of her books but didn't know that this particular book was being written in stages or in revisions during the time that she had several books being published. So writing this memoir really was a journey discovery and healing of her own as well.
I must admit that once I'd fnished the book, I was carrying a very heavy weight of saddness and grief in my mind and on my heart, as this journey is personal for me and my family as my Mom has Alzheimer's. Having been a RN working in nursing homes, I know the big picture look at what this disease is like and reading this book took my mind and heart there, to the end of Alzheimer's Road and down the road into the "what if's". I wholeheartedly agree that Alzheimer's is a life lost and grieved all along the way, not just at the end. I appreciate what I gained from this book, but today my focus must change to the "one day at a time, by the grace of God alone, we'll make it through this".
If you've got the desire to learn about what Alzheimer's is and about one family's experience in it, I recommend this book. Sue Miller is a phenomenal writer and she tells the story of her father vividly. Just know, to read it is to share in her pain and in her grief process. If you read this book, I would hope that maybe you'd even gain compassion for and strength to help share the load of this burden called Alzheimer's Disease with someone you know or love.
The Story of My Father is written with such a feel for Sue Miller's compelling need to share her father's journey, but also and maybe even more so, to learn more about who her father was as she wrote about losing "who" he was through this hellish disease. I have read several of her books but didn't know that this particular book was being written in stages or in revisions during the time that she had several books being published. So writing this memoir really was a journey discovery and healing of her own as well.
I must admit that once I'd fnished the book, I was carrying a very heavy weight of saddness and grief in my mind and on my heart, as this journey is personal for me and my family as my Mom has Alzheimer's. Having been a RN working in nursing homes, I know the big picture look at what this disease is like and reading this book took my mind and heart there, to the end of Alzheimer's Road and down the road into the "what if's". I wholeheartedly agree that Alzheimer's is a life lost and grieved all along the way, not just at the end. I appreciate what I gained from this book, but today my focus must change to the "one day at a time, by the grace of God alone, we'll make it through this".
If you've got the desire to learn about what Alzheimer's is and about one family's experience in it, I recommend this book. Sue Miller is a phenomenal writer and she tells the story of her father vividly. Just know, to read it is to share in her pain and in her grief process. If you read this book, I would hope that maybe you'd even gain compassion for and strength to help share the load of this burden called Alzheimer's Disease with someone you know or love.
April 27, 2021
Excellent book about having to help parents whith Alzheimers. It's informative and yet also an honest and entertaining read written with humour and love
February 17, 2010
This was very good, following Sue Miller on her sometimes funny, mostly difficult & often painful journey to bear witness to her father's final years of Alzheimers decline. She's unfailingly honest & digs deep into her own actions & reactions with her dad as he morphed from a lovely, gentle academic into a lost & occasionally troubled soul waiting for the end. The end mercifully comes for Alzheimers folks, accelerating as one faculty after another becomes impaired & dysfunctional. She was brave to take him on (seemingly no one else in the family was willing to stay so close to him as he approached the end) & she was brave to write this book about it, not sparing herself or him from her lazer-sharp observations of the reality for them both. . . .
October 8, 2021
Nice. Mild. I'll have to check out her fiction.
August 23, 2021
Disappointing. I picked this up at a library sale because it was about a Christian minister and Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia. Since our family is presently experiencing this, I though the book would be helpful. It was not. The missing ingredient in this story was hope. It was very obvious that the author, the minister's daughter did not share the faith of her father or the hope of his Christian faith - eternal life. Death by Alzheimer's is particularly slow, ugly, and excruciating for the family. No death, whether swift or drawn out is ever welcome. For Christians, however, to live is Christ and to die is gain. I pray for the author and her family that she will gain this hope, this faith, this love of God. In the meantime, I'm glad this hopeless book has been withdrawn from the library.
October 9, 2020
This book was written from the heart and the conscience as only a child who becomes a caregiver can do. The heartbreaking decline of her beloved father over decades is captured and explained and her confusion and conflicting thoughts on his situation echo those of us faced with parents suffering from Alzheimer's or Dementia.
Watching my father's dementia increase and take over his thought processes was painful, but I am ever grateful that Alzheimer's was not his disease. What a selfish thought to share!
For anyone going through this with a beloved parent/grandparent this is a must read. Elegantly written with all the doubts and second guessing that caregivers go through, it is a guide for any of us facing or living through the grief of a loved one lost to a diminished state.
Watching my father's dementia increase and take over his thought processes was painful, but I am ever grateful that Alzheimer's was not his disease. What a selfish thought to share!
For anyone going through this with a beloved parent/grandparent this is a must read. Elegantly written with all the doubts and second guessing that caregivers go through, it is a guide for any of us facing or living through the grief of a loved one lost to a diminished state.
August 23, 2023
My goodreads account said I had read this book before, but I didn't remember reading it. As I read it again, certain parts of it were familiar, but not all of it was.
I found it fascinating as I read it this time. I think it meant more personally as my brother and his family are struggling with this disease. It seems that now the scientific points hit me since we still don't know a lot about the disease. The personal points hit home more as we are dealing with this disease. I think of the day to day life he is living with his daughter and how difficult it must be for her. It also reminds me of how difficult it was for my Mom and her siblings as they struggled to deal with my grandmother's decline after chemo at 91 years of age.
An excellent book to read or reread.
I found it fascinating as I read it this time. I think it meant more personally as my brother and his family are struggling with this disease. It seems that now the scientific points hit me since we still don't know a lot about the disease. The personal points hit home more as we are dealing with this disease. I think of the day to day life he is living with his daughter and how difficult it must be for her. It also reminds me of how difficult it was for my Mom and her siblings as they struggled to deal with my grandmother's decline after chemo at 91 years of age.
An excellent book to read or reread.
October 17, 2018
Memoir. Miller’s father is a retired minister and religion professor when he is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When he can no longer live alone, he moves (is moved?) into an assisted living facility near Miller’s home in Boston, and then progresses / regresses to a nursing home. This memoir was written nearly 10 years after her father died. Written partly to deal with her grief, partly to help others, it is clear that her own grief remains fresh. Anyone who has helped to care for aging, dying parent will find much that is familiar here. Obviously – a bit weepy to read.
December 29, 2019
The author Sue Miller writes the story of her father’s journey with Alzheimer’s. It is a tasteful portrayal of an intelligent, kind man’s downward spiraling into dementia and death. She discusses the difficulty of being a care giver and how she coped with those difficulties. She also gives her readers quite a bit about the disease. I found the book to be very informative and written in a lovely style.
October 9, 2023
Miller's writing is great, as ever, but I didn't particularly connect with her father or what she and her family were going through. He dies from complications around Alzeimers and this memoir is really about the disease and the last few years of Miller's father's life. There is one story about the 'cats house' which has really stuck in my head though. Where her father buys a house without having gone inside it from a man who has kept up to 80 cats inside it for many years.
February 17, 2018
not sure if I liked it or it was just okay; the anger/hostility towards the mother was disappointing - was interested in the health issues of the father; we have made progress towards Alzheimer's since this was written, thank goodness. some of the language was not necessary - could have used other words
November 10, 2020
I love Sue Miller's writing, but this was excellent even for non Sue Miller fans. She talks so beautifully about her father and the complicated relationships we all have with our aging family members. I learned a good deal about Alzheimer's and found it something I think others who have this in their family would appreciate.
February 6, 2020
Beautifully articulate and moving memoir of a daughter's reflections about her changing relationship with her father as his dementia progresses.
One of the best things I have read about this subject with many insights I can relate to.
One of the best things I have read about this subject with many insights I can relate to.
January 21, 2021
Heartbreaking account of how the author cared for her father through his Alzheimer's disease, and the effect of his death upon her life and writing. Now that I know this, I can see the deep influence of her parents in her novels. Wonderful, poignant read.
December 2, 2018
Audiobook performed by the author. The story of her relationship with her father, especially while he was experiencing progressive Alzheimer’s symptoms with good info on the disease itself.
December 20, 2019
Sue Miller is a beloved writer. I found reading this story heartbreaking concerning her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. What a caring daughter, despite often feeling very alone in his demise!
March 12, 2021
Very good. She talks about hard subjects and makes them very readable.
September 25, 2010
This is a wonderfully written memoir by Sue Miller about her father's long struggle with Alzheimer's disease. It opened my eyes to the heavy toll this disease takes on the individual and their family. Decisions on what care and living situation is best, not to mention affordable are never easy. I felt bad that she put her sweet father in a nursing home, and she writes candidly about how he struggled with the loss of his cherished books, how disorienting the change in routine and surroundings were for him, the unkind nurses and unsympathetic residents who did not understand his disease and treated him rudely. However, as his disease progressed I realized how overwhelming and almost impossible it would have been for one person to care for him and maintain some semblance of a life and career. So I cannot judge her decisions.
Miller's father was deeply religious and, in fact, taught for 25 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School and later at the Princeton Theological Seminary. One story from her childhood in chapter four caught my attention for its wisdom. As a 14 year old Miller decided she could no longer in good conscience take part in communion; that she couldn't pretend to be someone she clearly was not. She presented this decision to her father and was outraged when he gently responded that "he's sorry she feels that way but that he will honor her decision." When she pressed him on the subject craving more of a reaction from him, he responded that he and her mother wanted to give their children religious training so that the path to faith would be familiar to them. Later, he says, if your thinking changes (and he hopes it does) you will know how to find your way back to believing, and to the church too. I share his thinking on that subject.
In her father's last difficult weeks and months before dying, Miller often comforted him by singing hymns and reading to him from the Bible - especially from Psalms. She said the familiar cadence of scripture and hymns calmed his agitated nerves even though he was far removed from being able to understand the words. I love that!
While I haven't given Sue Miller's novels such high marks, I give her four stars for this touching work of non-fiction.
Miller's father was deeply religious and, in fact, taught for 25 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School and later at the Princeton Theological Seminary. One story from her childhood in chapter four caught my attention for its wisdom. As a 14 year old Miller decided she could no longer in good conscience take part in communion; that she couldn't pretend to be someone she clearly was not. She presented this decision to her father and was outraged when he gently responded that "he's sorry she feels that way but that he will honor her decision." When she pressed him on the subject craving more of a reaction from him, he responded that he and her mother wanted to give their children religious training so that the path to faith would be familiar to them. Later, he says, if your thinking changes (and he hopes it does) you will know how to find your way back to believing, and to the church too. I share his thinking on that subject.
In her father's last difficult weeks and months before dying, Miller often comforted him by singing hymns and reading to him from the Bible - especially from Psalms. She said the familiar cadence of scripture and hymns calmed his agitated nerves even though he was far removed from being able to understand the words. I love that!
While I haven't given Sue Miller's novels such high marks, I give her four stars for this touching work of non-fiction.
October 29, 2010
Sue Miller has written best selling books like “The Good Mother” and “While You Were Gone.” This more personal book is as much her own story as her father’s. As she notes, over the course of writing the book she remembers intensely, then finds herself “revising” some of her long held beliefs about her father. Some of this comes down to giving more consideration to her father’s belief in God.
She sees her father as a Christian so much in God’s hands from the start that he accepted all, including Alzheimer’s, without struggle. “For him his life and death already made sense” as he belonged and always would belong to God. There were really no personal choices to be made. He didn’t need his daughter “to rescue him, to make sense of his life” with her book. “But it is by the making of the story, and by everything that changed in my understanding of him and of myself as I made it, that I have been, as the writer that I am, also consoled.”
You may especially like this if you have been brought up Catholic, or spent much time thinking about the places where faith and family relationships intersect.
She sees her father as a Christian so much in God’s hands from the start that he accepted all, including Alzheimer’s, without struggle. “For him his life and death already made sense” as he belonged and always would belong to God. There were really no personal choices to be made. He didn’t need his daughter “to rescue him, to make sense of his life” with her book. “But it is by the making of the story, and by everything that changed in my understanding of him and of myself as I made it, that I have been, as the writer that I am, also consoled.”
You may especially like this if you have been brought up Catholic, or spent much time thinking about the places where faith and family relationships intersect.
November 10, 2011
Despite its physical size (I read it in one day), this book deals with one of life's heaviest issues: how to care for a dying parent. The fact that Sue and her father had a loving relationship to begin with makes a huge difference in her ability, her compassion, her humanity to do this difficult task with love and respect. It's not a leg up that I would have in the same situation, so my memoir would probably be the one that got put away and not written (as she says in the final chapter). I respect her ability to keep coming back to this story, and for writing it despite the fact that the narrative itself wasn't what she "wanted" to or "was looking" to write. Sure, this tenacity amounts to her genius as a writer of fiction, in which details are rarely factual and never in your control, but it is much more than that, too. It also illustrates her loyalty as a daughter. And it's nice (for once) to see that being a good writer can assist your aspirations in relationships!
May 17, 2014
Miller describes her father's progression through various stages of Alzheimer's Disease and includes details about his life and her relationship with him throughout her life span.
I have read a few memoirs by children whose parents have Alzheimer's. This offers another voice to that discussion. I admit that I read with less care the chapters that did not discuss AD (about 1/3 of the book). If a person is going to read 20 AD memoirs, this should be included, but if they are only going to read 5, there are others with more detail about the disease and the caregiver's challenges.
But I applaud her for making a contribution to the genre. AD will affect more and more Americans in the next 30 years, and I believe memoirs about the relationship between caregiver and the person with dementia are more useful than reference books about the disease.
I have read a few memoirs by children whose parents have Alzheimer's. This offers another voice to that discussion. I admit that I read with less care the chapters that did not discuss AD (about 1/3 of the book). If a person is going to read 20 AD memoirs, this should be included, but if they are only going to read 5, there are others with more detail about the disease and the caregiver's challenges.
But I applaud her for making a contribution to the genre. AD will affect more and more Americans in the next 30 years, and I believe memoirs about the relationship between caregiver and the person with dementia are more useful than reference books about the disease.
September 14, 2014
This is a very personal story of one man's descent into Alzheimer's disease told from the perspective of his daughter. This is a journey that I have walked with my mother so I could easily identify with many of the things she had to say. I chose to handle some things differently, but was always an advocate on my mom's behalf as Sue Miller was for her father. This is a disease where you grieve over and over the ongoing losses and when all is done it is easy to question whether there was more you could have done. I believe that writing this was cathartic for the author and tgink it would be a good book for workers in long-term care to read and absorb.
November 29, 2008
I liked this book but I came away with somewhat of a negative feeling toward Sue Miller because she put her father in a nursing home. Her father had been an academic and even in senility he was a sweet, gentle spirit who, as I recall, did not create big problems in his dotage. It was downhill for him after being relegated to a nursing home and he died soon after. I know I have not walked in her shoes, but I felt that Sue Miller would have served her father better by continuing to care for him at home.
February 2, 2016
A memoir that can be read purely as literature, and as a guide for those caring for a loved one with dementia; not a self-help guide, surely, but more like the travel guides of old. By telling her highly-specific story in such detail, it becomes universal. Miller gives the reader a coin for Charon from someone who has already crossed the river.
However, even if you have no interest in Alzheimer's, this memoir is worth reading as an investigation of the narratives we impose on our lives, and the lives of those we love.
However, even if you have no interest in Alzheimer's, this memoir is worth reading as an investigation of the narratives we impose on our lives, and the lives of those we love.
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