The Story of My Father: A Memoir

by Sue Miller

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father, James Nichols, once a truly vital man, as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Beginning an intensely personal journey, she recalls the bitter irony of watching this church historian wrestle with his increasingly befuddled notion of time and meaning. She details the struggles with doctors, her own choices, and the attempt to find a caring response to a disease whose special cruelty is to diminish the humanity of those it strikes. In luminous prose, Sue Miller has fashioned a compassionate inventory of two lives, a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345455444
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/08/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, Inventing the Abbotts, and The Good Mother. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 29, 1943

Place of Birth:

Chicago, Illinois

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College, 1964; M.A.T., Wesleyan U., 1965; Ed.M., Harvard U., 1975; M.A. Boston U., 1980

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Story of My Father"
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Copyright © 2004 Sue Miller.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Interviews

A Conversation with Sue Miller

Q: This is by far the most personal work you've written to date. Was it difficult to reveal your family to your readers?
A: I did feel some sense of responsibility about what I revealed about my family in this book. I tried to be very careful of those members of my family, mostly my siblings, who are still alive -- not to write anything which might wound one of them. I think there are things in the book which may, not because of the way they are presented, but rather that they are painful facts. I felt comfortable writing about my father because I thought he would have liked my making some use for other people out of his illness.

Q: Did you consider weaving elements of your father's life into a novel or short story instead of writing a nonfiction book about him?
A: In fact, I have woven elements of my father's life—and the lives of almost everyone I know! — into my fiction. I've even woven elements of his illness and the events that happened during his illness into my fiction. There's a section of THE DISTINGUISHED GUEST which I mention in the memoir in which I refer, fictionally, to the way he tore up all his letters to and from my mother. And in FOR LOVE I wrote a passage about my main character's taking dictation for a letter to herself from her mother, something which also happened to me and my father. There are no doubt others which aren't so closely imitative of life, and which I'm less conscious of.

Q: Your novels are beloved for their seamless and intertwined storylines. Was it difficult to find the narrative thread necessary to tell a real life story?
A: I would bepleased if what you say is true. And certainly one of the great difficulties for me in writing this book was structuring it. I threw away more than I kept, and I reordered everything I kept many times over. In the end, the book moves generally chronologically, but it stops and turns many times to look at issues raised by events going on; or history outside the chronology connected to other events. It took me literally years to figure out how I wanted to do this.

Q: Your parents were very dramatic people. Please tell us a little about them and their influence on your writing.
A: My mother was dramatic. My father was quiet and gentle, a little dry, certainly primarily intellectual. They made a dramatic contrast, though, and one I think everyone in my family was aware of. Both of them were wonderful writers, exacting and careful with language in very different ways. Both of them were passionate readers. Both believed in the power of language to move and console and redeem the listener, the reader. All of that was a gift to me as a writer.

Q: When you pieced together memories of your father, did you discover parts of him you'd forgotten or perhaps had never known?
A: A good deal of the book, particularly the last passages of the book, are taken up with this idea, that it is possible to go on learning about someone who has died, to change the way you understand them even after death. That this is one of the ways we continue to be connected to those we love.

Q: When did you first realize that your father was ill? How long did it take to diagnose his illness as Alzheimer's disease?
A: I think I had a sense fairly soon after my mother's death in 1979 that something was powerfully wrong with my father. He was sixty-five then, and Alzheimer's disease wasn't the first thing I thought of—in fact, depression was. But over time it seemed clear that some degenerative process was at work in him. He wasn't diagnosed, though, until 1986. This was mostly because it wasn't until then that he moved near enough to one of us—my sister, at that point—for her to take charge of seeking a diagnosis. Before then, he'd been in charge of his own medical care, and it seemed he didn't ask about his failures in a way that could have led to being tested.

Q: What aspect of caring for your father was most difficult?
A: There was no aspect that wasn't difficult, as everything was colored by the illness, even idle moments, even small decisions—to say nothing of large ones. But there were many moments too which were genuinely pleasurable, even towards the end.

Q: Did you ever have a moment when you thought you couldn't handle the responsibility of caring for him?
A: No. There were moments when I wished I didn't have to, moments when I didn't think I was doing a good job. But I never thought I couldn't do it.

Q: Your father was a minister. What role did his spirituality play as the disease progressed?
A: This is hard for me to know, exactly. I think early on it helped him enormously to accept that he was ill, and to accept the changes in his life we had to make because of his illness. I'm not sure what it consisted in as he grew more demented—whether you could have said he was still a Christian, for instance. Or a believer, in anything like the way he'd once been. Whether he felt the presence of God, as he'd been sure he did earlier in his life. But he could always be comforted by the language of religion, by prayer in a familiar form, by passages from the Bible read aloud. By hymns. There seemed to be something which stilled him and brought him peace in all of that.

Q: Do you worry that one day your son may have to care for you in the same way?
A: Of course.

Q: Do you also wonder how he'll remember you?
A: I don't, really. I feel that my son knows me well—I would say, that he understands me, in most ways. I don't know what changes age may bring to me, and certainly it seems entirely possible that I might eventually end up being changed profoundly, in the way my father was. What my son may make of that, if it happens, will be part of who he is and has become, as well as part of who I am and have been with him.

Q: Like your novels, there are many levels to this book. It seemed a journey for you, but also a tribute to your father. Do you think you wrote the book more for yourself, or for your father?
A: I think that moved and shifted, more than several times, as I worked through the writing of the book. In the end, I suppose, I think that every book a writer writes, she writes for herself. But I was aware of hoping, as I finished the final revision, that it was a book my father would have liked, would have seen a justification for.

Q: Are you working on a new novel?
A: I am. Though I've been slow to turn to it.

Editorial Reviews

Deft, sincere and eloquent. . . With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her well-crafted and bestselling fiction, Sue Miller has now written a beautiful, compelling memoir about her father and his downward spiral into the demonic grasp of Alzheimer’s disease.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Stunning. . . A remarkable yet self-effacing testament to the vagaries of memory . . . [Miller] turns a man’s simple life and tragic death into a lively and unforgettable narrative.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Deeply affecting . . . Like any memoir, this one is a way of bringing its subject back to life. . . . [This] beautifully written little book takes on the narrative power of first-rate fiction.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Beautifully written . . . Style and story are so seamlessly fused, and so perfectly balanced, that true clarity emerges."
—The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
When a novelist is as deft as Sue Miller at underlining the great drama and humanity in the small gestures and circumstances of everyday life, analytical types might surmise that her approach serves as a filter for interpreting her world. Her bestselling The Good Mother can be read as an encapsulation of her feelings about the conflicts of romantic entanglements with child rearing; The Distinguished Guest was a roman à clef about dealing with her charismatic, difficult mother. So her decision to write about her father and his Alzheimer's-induced decline in the form of a memoir indicates the depth of her emotions on this extremely personal matter. In the years before his eventual death, Miller's father, a retired minister, became increasingly unfamiliar to -- and dependant on -- the offspring who had grown up in awe of him. Using this steady decline as a frame for her larger narrative (her father's condition progressed from intermittent forgetfulness, confusion, and strangely charming hallucinations to frightening and violent outbursts), Miller writes touchingly of her father's life, of her place in it, and of his place in hers. At the same time, she discourses about her work, and about the writer's mining her own life experiences for art. In the end, Miller leaves us with a rare result: a book that offers instruction, information, and sympathy for the adult children of Alzheimer's sufferers and real, intuitive expression about the writer's role in experiencing and recording it. Katherine Hottinger

bn.com

Novelists, Flaubert said, disappear behind their work. It's safe to say that memoirists do not. The Story of My Father is actually more the story of Sue Miller. Is this why memoirs are so tempting to writers? Because they give us permission to be self-serving? I ask this as someone not immune to the disease: I've written one myself. To put the best face on it, memoirs are testimonials to the private life. But they may owe their popularity to contrary forces — to our contempt for the private and the personal, both of which we seem bent on defiling. We display our secrets on the Web or reveal them to Oprah, anything to dissolve them in the acid bath of public exposure. In this respect, Miller's book should be admired for its struggle between tell-all, all-the-time revelation and the virtues of privacy and reserve. And we may hope that what she hasn't told us here is being saved for a novel. — John Vernon

The New York Times

Miller's first nonfiction book (after While I Was Gone; The World Below; etc.), about caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted father, is a rare example of an illness memoir with widespread appeal. Prospective readers need not have any interest in Alzheimer's; they need only have parents of their own to appreciate this testimony's dignity and grace. Miller's father, James Nichols, started showing signs of dementia in 1986, when he was picked up by the police after ringing a stranger's doorbell in the middle of the night, announcing he was lost. Miller's careful recounting of James's slow demise and progression through the various stages of an assisted living community are punctuated by pleasant memories and even humor, e.g., when James, a retired religious scholar, assesses his surroundings and comments, "No one ever seems to graduate from here." As she recalls childhood stories and family memories, Miller simultaneously offers a memoir of her own development as a writer. "[T]his is the hardest lesson... for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease," Miller writes. "We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.... Did you visit once a week? you might have visited twice. Oh, you visited daily? but perhaps he would have done better if you'd kept him at home. In the end all those judgments, those self-judgments, are pointless. This disease is inexorable, cruel. It scoffs at everything." 11 photos. BOMC alternate. (Mar. 19) Forecast: Miller's popularity among women readers of literary works-many whom are probably dealing with aging parents themselves-could shoot this one onto bestseller lists, and Knopf shouldn't have trouble selling out its 75,000 first printing. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This first nonfiction work from novelist Miller (The World Below) is a thoughtful remembrance of her relationship with her father, especially during his later years, when his memory loss caused by Alzheimer's became apparent. It is also a meditation on the meaning of writing in her life. A clergyman and church historian, James Nichols was an occasionally absent but always attentive father during Miller's childhood. Although father and daughter grew apart as she struggled to launch her writing career, their bond rekindled as Nichols's memory impairment became evident and his independence declined. After his diagnosis, she helped him restore an old house and found him assisted living and then nursing home care as he gradually disappeared into a world of hallucinations and delusions that turned increasingly violent. Near the end of his life, Miller realized that "my father's illness would be progressive, no matter what I did. You can never make a difference in the course of the disease." After ten years, many false starts, and two more novels, she finally completed this memoir. While writing enabled her to "snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer's," it also deepened her understanding of what her father's disease and death meant to him. More reflective than Eleanor Cooney's Death in Slow Motion, this includes little of the medical information found in Charles P. Pierce's Hard To Forget: An Alzheimer's Story. Miller's very personal account is a marvelous addition to the growing literature of Alzheimer's memoirs and will appeal to fans of her novels as well. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/02.]-Karen McNally Bensing, Benjamin Rose Lib., Cleveland Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In a perfectly pitched memoir, novelist Miller (The World Below, 2001, etc.) 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, generous, disinterested attention." After the author became a parent herself, she grew closer to her mother, who died suddenly, at the age of 60, in 1979. 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 thismemoir, she finds, brings her consolation; her father, she realizes, had never needed it because of his faith: "for him his life and death already made sense." A loving and eloquent tribute from a talented daughter. (11 photos) First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Miller shows here that not only can she write a fine and sensitive tale, but she can read it as well. Step by loving step, she takes us painfully through her father’s descent into the mindlessness that is Alzheimer’s. We learn of the disease and of her father--scholar, minister, singer of silly songs, a gentle counterpart to her outspoken and moody mother. Miller demonstrates in word and tone the bewilderment, anxiety, sadness, and sense of futility felt by all those close to Alzheimer’s patients. From the opening description of the phone call from the Massachusetts police who have found her father wandering to the closing explanation of why it took over 10 years to write this story, we are taken on an intensely personal and revealing journey by a wise and intelligent guide. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 03 - AudioFile