The Book: The Story of My Father: A Memoir, by Sue Miller

The Story: Sue Miller, a well known novelist, is taken totally off guard when her reliable, wonderful father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It’s a hard pill to swallow for any child, but for Sue it seemed especially hard because he had always been the firm foundation that her family was built on. Her mom was a little kooky and so her dad served to hold everything together.

In order to hold on to the person she remembered, she set out to document his life and in the process ended up documenting his mental decline as well.

What I Thought: If you have ever read Sue Miller’s novels, you know that she writes in this gritty, real, compelling way. She is just one of those authors who has a finger on people’s emotions and just the “human condition.” Hearing her use that same tone and emotion to talk about her own family was kind of extraordinary.

My Grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last year and it has been absolutely heartbreaking to watch her go from doing the crossword every morning to struggling to remember what grandkids/great grandkids belong to what children. She is the mother of 8 and her sons and daughters and her husband have just come around her and loved her in the best way that they know how. It is hard to watch her decline, but it is wonderful to see the love flowing out of the people who love her even as she is becoming less and less the mother and wife that they know.

With that as my background, reading this kind of tore me to bits. Sue Miller really struggled with watching her Dad’s memory and personality go but didn’t shy away from it. She spent time with him just loving him and being with him and struggling right along side him. One thing that she said that was really beautiful and true was that there are all these awful things that come with a disease like Alzheimer’s, but it seems like families always pride themselves on something. Her dad never got mean or violent and that just touched her, that even when parts of him were slipping away, he never lost that kindness and politeness that made him who he was. She saw all the negative things that were happening but made the choice to focus instead on this one positive thing that she could pull out. There is something really powerful in that.

Conclusion: If you have a family member going through this, I would recommend this without a doubt. Still Alice is another one that has really helped me empathize with my Grandma as she loses more and more of her memory. They are tough reads but really, really beneficial.

The Book: Lost in the Forest, by Sue Miller

The Story: Like most of Sue Miller’s books, Lost in the Forest is a family drama.  Of course, this is a more “modern” family, with divorced parents, a step-dad and friends who are considered family.  Let me lay some groundwork.  Eva and Mark were married and had two girls, Emily and Daisy.  They divorced and Eva got married again to a guy named John.  They had a son named Theo.  Gracie is Eva’s best friend and her husband is Duncan.  Those are all of the main players.

In the very first chapter, John dies by being struck by a car while out for a walk.  Really, the first half of this book is the entire extended family dealing with this grief.  Eva is distraught and Mark ends up watching all of the kids, even Theo.  Emily is visibly sad and really vocal about it while Daisy is just quieter.  Because this book is written from several different perspectives, we get to see this a lot of different ways.  Daisy is an interesting character because when we see her from the other perspectives, she just seems like a shallow, whiney teenager, but when she is given a chance to “speak,” the reader really finds out that she is deeper than that and more desperate for attention than anyone really realizes.

The second half of the book focuses on Daisy a lot and that search for attention and approval.  She starts to kind of lose control.  She starts stealing and sleeping with a pretty unlikely suspect and hiding pretty much her whole life from everyone around her.  Her part of the story is written in a way that we get glimpses of how Daisy actually turns out, which makes her character much more complex than the others.

A real under riding current in this book is the idea of happiness.  It just an idea that many characters- main and background- end up sharing their view of.  Mark’s mom sees happiness as merely contentment.  There is a self-help speaker who lays out the steps.  Near the end one of the characters (I can’t remember who) says that as Americans we just want to push a button and be happy.  These are just the examples that pop into my head right off the bat.  There were a lot of bits about happiness and it was interesting to see how the different views on happiness effect the characters who feel that way.

What I Thought: I kind of have a thing for Sue Miller.  She and Anne Lammott write the best domestic drama-type books around, and I love me some domestic drama.  I’m not even sure if that is a term, but what I’m saying is that I like a book that puts a family in some random situation and then lets them squirm out together.  I can’t get enough.

What I like about Sue Miller is how honest her characters are.  If you read my blog for any amount of time, you’ll always hear me come back to this.  I want characters who feel and who react in real, honest ways.  These characters do this.  They are vulnerable and their relationships with each other seem like relationships that could really happen.

The only issue I had with this book was that the characters were just so totally caught up in each others lives that there is never any perspective, for the reader or for the characters.  The focus is so slim that it does seem to lose something.

Conclusion: This is a short, little book that packs a pretty good punch.  Probably not Sue Miller’s best, but it’s still good stuff.