Death In Slow Motion A Memoir of a Daughter, Her Mother and the Beast Called Alzheimer's

(Paperback)

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Description

A raw, unsentimental and passionately written memoir about trying to care for a parent with Alzheimers

When her once-glamorous and witty novelist-mother got Alzheimer's, Eleanor Cooney moved her from her beloved Connecticut home to California in order to care for her. In tense, searing prose, punctuated with the blackest of humor, Cooney documents the slow erosion of her mother's mind, the powerful bond the two shared, and her own descent into drink and despair.

But the coping mechanism that finally serves this eloquent writer best is writing, the ability to bring to vivid life the memories her mother is losing. As her mother gropes in the gathering darkness for a grip on the world she once loved, succeeding only in conjuring sad fantasies of places and times with her late husband, Cooney revisits their true past. Death in Slow Motion becomes the mesmerizing story of Eleanor's actual childhood, straight out of the pages of John Cheever; the daring and vibrant mother she remembers; and a time that no longer exists for either of them.

Reviews

"A strong and honest book." -- Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine

"Well-written [and] harrowing." -- Publishers Weekly

"Cooney tells it all with a fine and rare mix of black humor and bleak honesty." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Poignant...terrific.... Consider it a must-read." -- Booklist

"Novelist Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and painful despair into a new memoir." -- BookPage

"Cooney creates that eye-of-the-hurricane feeling, of life destroyed and made meaningless by loss, that this topic deserves." -- Book Magazine

"Heartfelt and exquisitely narrated...Immensely moving and terrifyingly funny.... Vibrant and compelling.... -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Death In Slow Motion is a brutally honest, yet remarkably funny and deeply wise book. -- Hartford Courant

"Cooney chronicles her mother's gradual, grinding dissolution...in wry, learned prose." -- Time magazine

"Cooney's memoir... is too fierce and unsparing, too honest and outraged, to be read complacently." -- Chicago Tribune Book Review

Author Bio

Eleanor Cooney has published four novels. She lives in Mendocino, California.