A simply told, moving memoir.
An actress tells the story of how her mother’s dementia changed their relationship and affected their family.
When Williams-Paisley discovered that her mother, Linda, had a rare form of dementia called primary progressive aphasia, she had no idea how much the disease would impact her life. The mother she knew growing up was warm and exuberant, and while the author drifted away from her during a period of teenage rebellion, she always knew that Linda—who firmly supported her daughter’s desire to become an actress—had only the best of intentions. Adulthood and acting success brought Williams-Paisley closer to her mother, who by that time had found her own career success as a fundraiser for nonprofit organizations. But the author’s marriage to country star Brad Paisley created distance between them. The rift soon healed, but that Christmas, her parents revealed to Williams-Paisley and her siblings that Linda had been diagnosed with early-stage dementia. In the year that followed, Linda’s life began to unravel. First came early retirement from her job, followed by increasing problems with memory and speech. Most painful of all were the behavioral changes that transformed a once-vibrant woman into an unpredictable, at-times violent monster no one recognized. Terrified of "New Mom,” who needed “to be treated with care and caution,” Williams-Paisley feared for the safety of her children as well as the well-being of her father. Only after she had worked past the trauma of seeing a loved one transform so completely and the guilt at not being able to offer more assistance was she finally able to make peace with who her mother had become. Heartbreaking but never sentimental, Williams-Paisley’s book offers an intimate look at a family’s struggle with a life-altering disease. It is also a daughter’s tribute to the mother whose disease offered her a new opportunity to “love unconditionally…and practice being comfortable with…[the] uncomfortable.”
A simply told, moving memoir.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90295-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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