This is one of the best books I have read about dealing with Alzheimers in a parent. I loved the book Her Beautiful Brain by my friend Ann Hedreen. And this book was just as good. Here is my review of What we Carry: A Memoir by Maya Lang.

Some of you know my father has Alzheimers and has been living in a lockdown facility now for three years. He no longer knows who I am. As I read this book and the account of the author with her mother’s spiral into Alzheimers it was all very familiar to me.

Like Hedreen’s book, Lang shares her day to day struggles with her mother’s dementia; from the early days when she just seems confused, to the anger and finally placidity before no memory at all.

During this journey with her mother Lang learns a great deal of history of her family that she never knew. Through her formative years she had idolized her brilliant doctor mother for immigrating from India and making a life for herself and her family in the USA. But as the dementia slowly tears her mother apart, Lang learns astonishing and heartbreaking information that makes her question her family and decisions her mother made along the way.

It’s a beautifully written tale of mothers and daughters, families and the foundations we build through facts and fiction we are fed as children. A wonderful memoir for anyone who has a parent with Alzheimers and frankly, anyone who has a parent.

****Four stars for What we Carry: A Memoir by Maya Lang

See last week’s review of About Grace by Anthony Doerr

My current read Run by Ann Patchett

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