The Story of My Father: A Memoir
- Book Review,
by Sue Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Miller's first nonfiction book (after While I Was Gone; The World Below; etc.), about caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted father, is a rare example of an illness memoir with widespread appeal. Prospective readers need not have any interest in Alzheimer's; they need only have parents of their own to appreciate this testimony's dignity and grace. Miller's father, James Nichols, started showing signs of dementia in 1986, when he was picked up by the police after ringing a stranger's doorbell in the middle of the night, announcing he was lost. Miller's careful recounting of James's slow demise and progression through the various stages of an assisted living community are punctuated by pleasant memories and even humor, e.g., when James, a retired religious scholar, assesses his surroundings and comments, "No one ever seems to graduate from here." As she recalls childhood stories and family memories, Miller simultaneously offers a memoir of her own development as a writer. "[T]his is the hardest lesson... for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease," Miller writes. "We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.... Did you visit once a week? you might have visited twice. Oh, you visited daily? but perhaps he would have done better if you'd kept him at home. In the end all those judgments, those self-judgments, are pointless. This disease is inexorable, cruel. It scoffs at everything." 11 photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As her father succumbs to Alzheimer's, Miller examines both his life and her own. The popular novelist will launch her first book-length piece of nonfiction with a seven-city tour. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
Novelist Miller shows here that not only can she write a fine and sensitive tale, but she can read it as well. Step by loving step, she takes us painfully through her father's descent into the mindlessness that is Alzheimer's. We learn of the disease and of her father--scholar, minister, singer of silly songs, a gentle counterpart to her outspoken and moody mother. Miller demonstrates in word and tone the bewilderment, anxiety, sadness, and sense of futility felt by all those close to Alzheimer's patients. From the opening description of the phone call from the Massachusetts police who have found her father wandering to the closing explanation of why it took over 10 years to write this story, we are taken on an intensely personal and revealing journey by a wise and intelligent guide. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Miller's heartbreaking story of her gentle clergyman father's descent into Alzheimer's disease is part bibliotherapy, part memoir as she struggles to conquer her grief and banish her last haunting images of him, hoping to reclaim him as the loving parent he was for most of his life. In 1986, Miller is forced to starkly confront her father's illness when she receives a telephone call from the police, who have detained him; he is terribly disoriented and has lost his car. Like an archaeologist, Miller begins to sift and resift the past, looking for clues to the onset of the illness. Then eloquently, always eloquently, she sounds the universal chord of dismay felt by children forced to watch helplessly as their parents are beset by grave illness: "This could not be what was happening to Dad. Not to my father. That he would be diminished, and diminished again, before he died? That I would lose him, over and over, before the final loss?" Miller's book is another fine addition to the growing body of poignant literature on dealing with Alzheimer's, such as, most recently, Eleanor Cooney's Death in Slow Motion (see p.814). Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Deft, sincere and eloquent. . . With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her well-crafted and bestselling fiction, Sue Miller has now written a beautiful, compelling memoir about her father and his downward spiral into the demonic grasp of Alzheimer’s disease.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Stunning. . . A remarkable yet self-effacing testament to the vagaries of memory . . . [Miller] turns a man’s simple life and tragic death into a lively and unforgettable narrative.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Deeply affecting . . . Like any memoir, this one is a way of bringing its subject back to life. . . . [This] beautifully written little book takes on the narrative power of first-rate fiction.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Beautifully written . . . Style and story are so seamlessly fused, and so perfectly balanced, that true clarity emerges."
—The Boston Globe
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