What do You think about 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
