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In a Tangled Wood An Alzheimer's Journey by Joyce Dyer foreword by Ian Frazier |
Joyce Dyer's memoir offers readers a rare and authentic glimpse into the world and culture of an Alzheimer's special care unit. Her mother is the central focus, but we come to know an entire group of people, each in various stages of Alzheimer's and each affected in a different way by its ravages. Through the inhabitants of the unit, and through the staff that cares for them, we learn about Alzheimer's disease, and about the boundlessness of the human spirit.
Dyer offers no cure for Alzheimer's, but she does discover wonder and hope. This is a powerful book, filled with pain and sadness, but one that demonstrates the irony that this devastating disease can offer occasion for joy and laughter as well.
"From the moment I began reading In a Tangled Wood I was transfixed. The heartbreaks and joys, contradictions, absurdities, and lessons of my own experience with Alzheimer's disease were all there. With exquisite observation of detail and irony, and with profound humanity, Joyce Dyer writes the truth beautifully."—Deborah Hoffman, writer, director, and producer of the Oscar-nominated film Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
"Dyer is an experienced guide who offers her own humility, humor, and wisdom to families facing this terrible terrain."—Thomas R. Cole, Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
"If a mother must lose her mind to Alzheimer's she is fortunate to have such a daughter gathering the pieces. With courage, compassion, and grace, and with startling humor, Joyce Dyer takes us into the presence of this harrowing disease, into the company of those who suffer and those who give care and those who helplessly watch. We return from the encounter with a more generous estimate of the human spirit, and with a deeper regard for the coherence and power of an undamaged mind."—Scott R. Sanders, author of Writing from the Center
"Another author might have chosen to fast-forward through the inevitabilities of this endgame. Ms. Dyer chooses instead to look hard at each living moment of her mother's decline, to find unexpected revelation there. . . . Her book is a marker, a reply, and an act of the special boldness one is granted by love."—Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and Family
"The book is a paean to the human spirit, to both the well and unwell who refuse to relinquish their capacity for wonder and compassion and joy."—Robert N. Butler, Director, International Longevity Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center (winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Why Survive? Being Old in America)
JOYCE DYER is director of writing and associate professor of English at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, where she teaches courses in fiction and nonfiction.
In a Tangled Wood
ISBN 0-87074-396-1 cloth $22.50
ISBN 0-87074-397-X paper $12.95
LC 96-11354. 6x9. 184 pp. Bib.
Medical Humanities/Death and Dying. Literary Nonfiction.
Publication Date: November 1996.
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