Aaron and Stella Alterra had been married for more than sixty years when Aaron began to notice puzzling lapses in his wife’s memory. Innocuous at first, they became more severe and more alarming. After a series of appointments and tests, the Alterras were informed that Stella was one of the more than 4.5 million Americans with Alzheimer’s disease. Combining medical research on the disease and often-painful anecdotes of memory loss, deteriorating motor functions, personality shifts, support-group and daycare experiences, and drug trials, Alterra chronicles his transformation from husband to caregiver after his wife’s diagnosis. More than a chronology of one family’s experience of Alzheimer’s disease, The Caregiver is an intelligent, beautifully reflective testimony to how family members turned caregivers become the ultimate advocates for their loved ones in the face of a disease with no cure.
In this thoughtful and honest memoir, Alterra effectively impresses on the reader that the ‘primary physician’ is not the doctor but the caregiver who lives with the patient.
A touchingly exact and superbly composed account written by a real writer. This is the best and most expert book on Alzheimer’s that I have read, and it should be closely studied by every caregiver.
Alterra is the pseudonym of a prolific and award-winning short story writer and novelist ... Alterra’s book will strike a chord with anyone who has a family member with Alzheimer’s: the search for understanding, the hallucinations, mood changes, loss of mental and physical functioning, and unpredictable nature of the disease.
A husband’s unsentimental but deeply loving memoir of caring for his wife.
Aaron Alterra is a pseudonym for E.S. Goldman, an award-winning fiction writer who publishes frequently in the Atlantic; he has published a novel and two volumes of short stories and lives in Cape Cod.
Arthur Kleinman is Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology, Professor Psychiatry, and Curator of Medical Anthropology in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. His books include Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture and The Illness Narratives.
