Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780345455444 ISBN: 0345455444 Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 208 Publication Date: June 08, 2004 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Release Date: June 08, 2004 Sales Rank: 218421 Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Memoir
A heart-felt memoir that could only be written by someone who has experienced this painful journey. My mother died of Alzheimer's and this book helped me with my healing. Thank you Sue Miller.
Rating: - I read some of this and wept
Parts of this memoir are very moving..I felt a tug in my heart for my father who is in the throws of Alzheimer's Disease.
Rating: - A memoir worth remembering
This is Sue Miller's first nonfiction book about her father, James Nichols, who started showing signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) well before he was picked up by the police after getting lost while driving his car. That incident, however, proved to be the moment of truth for his family yet Miller explains the tendency to repeatedly deny the disease: "It came and went anyway, and so again and again I was able to argue myself out of acknowledging it." Instances of acceptance are described too as she ... Read More
Rating: - Thorough Research Except For Hospice Service
3/15/05 Sue Miller's ability to show her father's decline from calm and compassionate to defensive ,often combative[ less selflessness :except in the latter section in the book where his concern in his dillusion that children had died in a fire] which had been no more than a "late night" fire drill at the 'Sutton Hill' Retirement Community Center, is a tribute to her as a biographer and an autobiographer (She speaks in "the 1st person").However, Pgs 149-153 , with 1.her father(Professor James Nichols)'s ... Read More
Rating: - An excellent writer tackles a problem many of us share
Perhaps I am a bit jaded; my father-in-law is in the late stages of dementia, and over the years I have read many books written by relatives who watch over a loved one's decline into this disease.
What Sue Miller adds to this "genre" is the general excellence of her writing. (Miller is well-known as the author of novels such as "The Good Mother.") Thus, "The Story of My Father" rises above the sad story of her father's decline (a story whose outlines will be familiar to many of us) and gives ... Read More
- Memoir
- I read some of this and wept
