The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's - Hardcover

by Jeanne Murray Walker (Author)

Award-winning poet Jeanne Murray Walker tells an extraordinarily wise, witty, and quietly wrenching tale of her mother's long passage into dementia. This powerful story explores parental love, profound grief, and the unexpected consolation of memory. While Walker does not flinch from the horrors of "the ugly twins, aging and death," her eye for the apt image provides a window into unexpected joy and humor even during the darkest days.

This is a multi-layered narrative of generations, faith, and friendship. As Walker leans in to the task of caring for her mother, their relationship unexpectedly deepens and becomes life-giving. Her mother's memory, which more and more dwells in the distant past, illuminates Walker's own childhood. She rediscovers and begins to understand her own past, as well as to enter more fully into her mother's final years.

The Geography of Memory is not only a personal journey made public in the most engaging, funny, and revealing way possible, here is a story of redemption for anyone who is caring for or expecting to care for ill and aging parents-and for all the rest of us as well.

Author Biography

Jeanne Murray Walker's poems and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including Poetry, the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Image, the Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, a Prairie-Schooner Glenna Luschei Prize, and a Pew Fellowship in The Arts. She is Professor of English at The University of Delaware as well as a mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Low Residency MFA Program. In her spare time Jeanne aspires to garden, to cook, to travel, and to read novels.