Dimensions
135 x 203 x 16mm
A Memoir of a Daughter, Her Mother and the Beast Called Alzheimer's.
This stunning memoir of caring for a parent with Alzheimer's is a richly textured read that should appeal to readers both of literary memoir and boomers caring for aging parents.
In bitter, searing prose, Cooney evokes the slow disintegration of her once-glamorous and witty mother who has succumbed to Alzheimer's. In order to care for her, Cooney installs her mother in a nearby apartment in California, setting up a regimen of vitamins, acupuncture, around- the-clock attention - but the disease rapidly and steadily progresses. Its relentless onslaught is terrifying in its own right, as her mother's failing memory prevents her from recognising even the most everyday objects, but on a more piercing level, it turns her mother into an insecure, fearful hypochondriac - everything that she wasn't before the disease.
By wrestling with the painful minutae of tedium and repetition that dementia thrusts upon the sufferer and her caretaker, Cooney honestly, and with a certain amount of black humour, explores a mother/daughter relationship at the end of its rope. Unquestionably Alzheimer's has warped them both.
