Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s: One Daughter’s Hopeful Story

＂An excellent book...an emotional and ruminative anchor...She leaves her readers with hope.＂-- San Francisco Chronicle

One journalist’s riveting and surprisingly hopeful in-the-trenches view of Alzheimer’s

Nearly five million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s. Like many children of Alzheimer’s sufferers, Lauren Kessler, an accomplished journalist, was devastated by the disease that seemed to erase her mother’s identity even before claiming her life. But suppose people with Alzheimer’s are not slates wiped blank. Suppose they experience friendship and loss, romance and jealousy, joy and sorrow? To better understand this debilitating condition, Kessler enlists as a bottom-of-the-rung caregiver at an Alzheimer’s facility and learns lessons that challenge what we think we know about the disease. A compelling, clear-eyed, and emotionally resonant narrative, Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s offers a new optimistic look at what the disease can teach us and a much-needed tonic for those faced with providing care for someone they love.

Previously published as Dancing With Rose.

Lauren Kessler is the author of six works of narrative nonfiction, including Raising the Barre: Big Dreams, False Starts, and My Midlife Quest to Dance the Nutcracker, the Washington Post bestseller Clever Girl, and the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, and The Nation. She directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon and lives in Eugene, Oregon.