The Story of My Father; A Memoir

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [8], 173, [11] pages. Frontis illustration. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads: To Susie - best wishes. Sue Miller. Contains several black and white family photographs. Also contains acknowledgments. Sue Miller (born November 29, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer who has written a number of best-selling novels. Two of her novels have been made into feature films, and her book While I Was Gone was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2000. Miller has taught creative writing classes at Smith College, Amherst, Tufts, MIT, and Boston University. The author's father, James Nichols, was a fourth-generation minister, a retired professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary. She recalls caring for him, and the bitter irony of watching him, a church historian, wrestle with Alzheimer's, a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time, history, and meaning. Derived from a Kirkus review: In a perfectly pitched memoir, novelist Miller movingly depicts the bittersweet emotions provoked by the toll Alzheimer's exacted on her father. He was an ordained minister and had taught Church History at the University of Chicago and Princeton. Unlike Miller's volatile, self-absorbed mother, who took greater pleasure in privacy than in maternity, her father was quiet, reserved, and fond of spending time with his four children. He read to them, taught them outdoor skills during their summers in Maine, and had a great gift for listening, giving their conversation his full attention. Miller resumed her old intimacy with her father, showing him her short stories, which were beginning to be published and spending summers with him in New Hampshire fixing up the house he had bought there. In retrospect, she recognizes that he already had Alzheimer's. He confessed to being unable to read or write since his wife died, but Miller attributed those symptoms to depression. He wore the same clothes often, but he had always been an abstracted man, caught up in the world of ideas. Six years after her mother died, Miller got a phone call from the police, who had found her father wandering around the countryside in western Massachusetts. He was clearly disoriented, and his children realized he could no longer live alone. Miller eventually became responsible for him, visiting almost daily at the nursing home and monitoring his care. She affectingly details his long decline as well as what is known about Alzheimer's. Writing this memoir, she finds, brings her consolation. A loving and eloquent tribute from a talented daughter.