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The Story Of My Father (2004)

The Story of My Father (2004)

Book Info

Author
Genre
Rating
3.82 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0345455444 (ISBN13: 9780345455444)
Language
English
Publisher
random house trade paperbacks

About book The Story Of My Father (2004)

This is the novelist Sue Miller's account of her father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease and his eventual death. But it is also about Miller's relationship with him before he became ill, and about her relationship with her mother, who predeceased him by many years (she died of a heart attack at age 60). The book is incredibly introspective, and while that's not unusual for a memoir, what I really appreciated about this one was Miller's focus on how and why she wrote the memoir in the first place, the process of revising the events and her feelings about them that come about when writing her own life. The fact that I like Miller's fiction a lot and that I am also a sucker for pretty much any memoir about death made this one a winner for me. I just loved how forthright Miller was about her feelings throughout: how conflicted she was about his death (he had been suffering from dementia for some time) and her own motives in writing about the entire process in the first place. I would put this on the shelf right alongside Patchett's Truth and Beauty, Hobbie's Being Brett, and Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home, all of which also beautifully describe the death of someone close to the writer. (Don't even get me started on all the ways I will exclude Didion's insanely overhyped Year of Magical Thinking from that same shelf.)

Miller describes her father's progression through various stages of Alzheimer's Disease and includes details about his life and her relationship with him throughout her life span.I have read a few memoirs by children whose parents have Alzheimer's. This offers another voice to that discussion. I admit that I read with less care the chapters that did not discuss AD (about 1/3 of the book). If a person is going to read 20 AD memoirs, this should be included, but if they are only going to read 5, there are others with more detail about the disease and the caregiver's challenges. But I applaud her for making a contribution to the genre. AD will affect more and more Americans in the next 30 years, and I believe memoirs about the relationship between caregiver and the person with dementia are more useful than reference books about the disease.

Do You like book The Story Of My Father (2004)?

I've really enjoyed Sue Miller's fiction and had high hopes for this one. I'm sad to say it fell flat for me. The whole book felt like it kept starting and stopping, and she spent so much time explaining to the reader what the memoir was going to be about, or not be about. The book felt really self-conscious and self-indulgent (and yes, I do feel like a horrible person for saying that about a book describing her father's decline into Alzheimer's, but there you have it). It occurs to me that perhaps the disjointed, stuttering nature of the book is intentional, as a way to bring the reader closer to how Miller felt going through the experience. Maybe that was the case, but it made this reader feel disconnected and annoyed, rather than what I imagine was the intention.
—Nicole

This is a very personal story of one man's descent into Alzheimer's disease told from the perspective of his daughter. This is a journey that I have walked with my mother so I could easily identify with many of the things she had to say. I chose to handle some things differently, but was always an advocate on my mom's behalf as Sue Miller was for her father. This is a disease where you grieve over and over the ongoing losses and when all is done it is easy to question whether there was more you could have done. I believe that writing this was cathartic for the author and tgink it would be a good book for workers in long-term care to read and absorb.
—Bev Walkling

Sue Miller has written best selling books like “The Good Mother” and “While You Were Gone.” This more personal book is as much her own story as her father’s. As she notes, over the course of writing the book she remembers intensely, then finds herself “revising” some of her long held beliefs about her father. Some of this comes down to giving more consideration to her father’s belief in God. She sees her father as a Christian so much in God’s hands from the start that he accepted all, including Alzheimer’s, without struggle. “For him his life and death already made sense” as he belonged and always would belong to God. There were really no personal choices to be made. He didn’t need his daughter “to rescue him, to make sense of his life” with her book. “But it is by the making of the story, and by everything that changed in my understanding of him and of myself as I made it, that I have been, as the writer that I am, also consoled.”You may especially like this if you have been brought up Catholic, or spent much time thinking about the places where faith and family relationships intersect.
—Jean

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