The memory eaters / Elizabeth Kadetsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kadetsky, Elizabeth, 1965- author.

Series:

Juniper prize for creative nonfiction.

Juniper prize for creative nonfiction

Language:

English

Physical Description:

xiii, 185 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2020]

Summary:

"On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct-easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

A Taxonomy of the Unknown p. 1

Modeling p. 17

Ghosts p. 21

Absences and Outages p. 43

The Memory Pavilion p. 63

The Oracle p. 85

Bombing the Ghost p. 99

Swerve p. 107

The Wallet Lady p. 131

Moths p. 135

Recovery p. 141

Meditations on Survival p. 151

A Room in the Memory Palace p. 171.

ISBN:

9781625345028

162534502X

OCLC:

1121422426