An Absent Mind

I find myself wavering when it comes to this book. On the one hand, it covers many of the horrific elements of Alzheimer's disease with chilling realism and provides quite a bit of educational insight as well. On the other hand, none of the characters are particularly likable and even the ones which are occasionally relatable are also rather crappy people at other points in the story.

The book is presented in a series of bite-sized chapters - sometimes less than two pages each on my phone's Kindle app - with alternating perspectives between an Alzheimer patient, his doctor, and his family members. While this also makes it much easier to read and gives plenty of breaks for those like myself who are bothered by the subject matter, it does tend to make relating to characters more difficult. One chapter, Saul - the man with Alzheimer's disease - will rant about something that happened and how he feels invalidated and bullied by his caregiver wife... only for the readers to find out a chapter later that the reason Monique (his wife) is upset is because he tried to rape her and called her horrible names.

This constant emotional roller coaster begins to feel exploitative of the reader after a while. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the chapter after chapter spent attempting to paint Saul's son, Joey, as a selfish and unloving monster who doesn't want anything to do with his father. It just plain isn't true, despite the sickening way his own mother and sister try to insist it is. In truth, Joey has complicated feelings due to his mother always favouring his sister and his father never expressing love or pride for him. His life was hell growing up, and it's difficult for him to handle the mix of emotions and grief and frustration when his father develops Alzheimer's disease. Nothing he ever does is good enough for his horrible hypocrite of a mother who spends a small eternity willingly enduring beatings and verbal abuse while whining that nobody cares how she feels (despite her refusing to actually tell them how bad things have become with Saul)... yet turns around and gives zero cares about how her son feels when she's harping on him 'not caring' and 'not visiting enough' even though he actually visits a couple times a week once Saul's in a care facility. It's infuriating to see everyone gang up on him and nobody stop to care how he feels because they're too busy talking trash about him over and over in their own chapters.

Other than that, the book suffers from portraying a family in which it's hard to like any of the members. Let's take a look at some of the things they have going for them:

Saul - He suspects his son may be gay because Joey broke up with a woman with large breasts; he says that if his son were gay, he'd never speak to him again. He also, at one point, talks about how prison is 'disgusting' because of the things masculine men are doing to each other in there. (Protip: he doesn't mean the shanking or fist fighting.) So, he already has homophobia going for him, which is extremely frustrating even though he does have the excuse of being mentally ill and a product of his time. On top of that, he constantly degrades his wife for her physical appearance and it's revealed in Monique's chapters that Saul forced her to stay out of work, kept her out of school, and drove away all the friends she had who spoke French because he didn't like her language. And once he has Alzheimer's disease, Saul reveals that he has a constant paranoia of Monique cheating on him - despite having actually cheated on her himself. Oh, and he beats her. Repeatedly. And tries to rape her. More than once. Also, he tried to force his daughter to get an abortion when she got pregnant before marriage because he cared more about his reputation as her father than her feelings. Hard to relate to or care about someone so cruel and vile.

Monique - She has a major martyr complex. While it's completely relatable and hauntingly true when she explains that nobody ever stops to ask how she's handling things and how everyone expects her to just stay sane while being forced into the position of caregiver, she actually brings an awful lot of it on herself. She refuses to hire a sit-in caregiver for even a few hours a day because she's so concerned what others will think if she's seen in public while her ailing husband is at home. She refuses to tell anyone when Saul starts brutally beating her, and refuses to put him in a care facility despite his decline being so severe she can't even sleep at night for fear of him hurting himself. Yet she complains about her lot in life when she keeps refusing to do any of the reasonable actions available to make it easier. She also pretends that she's being selfless by taking her deeply declining husband on a cruise "for him" after he's started brutalizing her, but instead she's subjecting innocent strangers to his outbursts and abuses. And, of course, her hypocrisy of not considering Joey's feelings; she completely dismisses that he's unable to handle watching his father decline in health and spends every opportunity she gets to trash talk him and accuse him of being an uncaring monster. It's sickening!

Joey - He's distant and he's bitter, and frankly I don't blame him one bit. His childhood was horrible and neither of his parents appear to love him. He genuinely does his best, even though it's not good enough for anyone... But he's also the kind of person who goes to his father with Alzheimer's disease and literally begs the poor man to give up and just die so his family won't have to suffer anymore. Words cannot explain how despicable a thing that is, considering it's highly likely that in some capacity his father understands what's being said and is helpless to respond.

Florence - She's the kind of person who thinks that if someone else isn't willing to dedicate as much of their life to visiting an ill relative as she does, they're not good enough. It's gross. But, worse, she's also the kind of person who forces her own children to kiss and hug a grandfather who's become abusive toward them. It's described as Saul having yelled at one of them so loudly that the child "wailed in terror for a good five minutes." But who cares about that? Not Florence! She forces her children to not just go to a token birthday party but also to be affectionate to the man who terrifies them. She never fully stops forcing them to visit and witness the outbursts until they're plagued with nightmares. What a crappy mom!

These characters are the people whose heads we have to visit in alteration from chapter to chapter. We have to hear in detail how Monique yells at her mentally declining husband for ‘playing with himself' in his own home, because she deems that ‘unacceptable.' We have to hear in detail how much Saul hates his wife's appearance and what a dirty horrible cheater he thinks she is... because she's talking to the lawyer in charge of his will and trying to get him to revise it before he declines too far. Our emotions are tugged by the cruelty of the disease and the stress it heaps upon those both directly and indirectly affected, but then that's countered by what a crappy family we're given as a window into the situation. The trouble is: all their flaws and unlikable traits make them feel far more realistic, but it also makes empathizing and connecting in general very difficult beyond the base line of feeling pity for the disease's impact.

All that said, however, I can't deny that there's a brutal realism to the way most elements are portrayed. In some spots, it slips - horribly so. Saul goes from a stomach-churningly childlike mentality where he wRITES lik tHIs... pREtty puPPY... (that hurt to emulate almost as much as it hurt to read) to having an entire chapter of mostly-coherent paranoid ramblings because it's necessary to portray the horror of the particular situation and its impact upon him. But overall? Yeah, it's highly realistic. That makes sense, because the author has suffered through the years of emotional torture when his own father fell to Alzheimer's disease. There's a unique perspective he offers which resonated with me as someone who's been there with a grandparent. I don't think anyone who hasn't been there and lived that could have offered the realistic elements which he did, and for that I feel I need to give the book credit. I just also did not enjoy reading it at all and eagerly await the moment it fades from my mind so I can get rid of the conflicting and uncomfortable emotions.

Overall, after much uncertainty and internal debate, I think I'm going to rate this book two stars. I don't feel like it really delivered on what was promised; many times, it felt less like an exploration of Saul's perspective as his mind slipped away and more like a collection of delusional rantings from the character insterspersed with glimpses of how terribly broken his family is in general.

While often relatable to me, due to having lived through the hell of being a surviving family member, I don't feel like it offered anything truly enlightening or enriching other than a few medical facts. It would have been far more insightful and evoked far more sympathy if the characters had been more likable. Instead of making me feel sick with sadness over the parts which reminded me of my grandmother's decline, I wish this book had made me feel compassion and concern for the actual characters and drawn emotions from me that way. It's what I'd hoped this book would do - more than the small handful of times where it did, only to later reveal horrifying context to negate those emotions - but, sadly, it did not.