BEFORE I FORGET, poignant, pleasingly honest trip through parental dementia

BEFORE I FORGET
TORY HENWOOD HOEN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A funny, heartfelt, late coming-of-age story that examines the role of memory in holding us back—and in moving us forward

Call it inertia. Call it a quarter-life crisis. Whatever you call it, Cricket Campbell is stuck. Despite working at a zeitgeist-y wellness company, the twenty-six-year-old feels anything but well. Still adrift after a tragedy that upended her world a decade ago, she has entered early adulthood under the weight of a new burden: her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

When Cricket’s older sister Nina announces it is time to move Arthur from his beloved Adirondack lake house into a memory-care facility, Cricket has a better idea. In returning home to become her father’s caretaker, she hopes to repair their strained relationship and shake herself out of her perma-funk. But even deeply familiar places can hold surprises.

As Cricket settles back into the family house at Catwood Pond―a place she once loved, but hasn’t visited since she was a teenager―she discovers that her father possesses a rare gift: as he loses his grasp of the past, he is increasingly able to predict the future. Before long, Arthur cements his reputation as an unlikely oracle, but for Cricket, believing in her father’s prophecies might also mean facing the most painful parts of her history. As she begins to remember who she once was, she uncovers a vital truth: the path forward often starts by going back.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lots of us have, or had, fraught relationships with our fathers. Cricket does...her dad Arthur was fairly easy to love despite his flaws, but her past held an ugly undealt-with darkness. Her older sister has been coping as best she can with Arthur's dementia but she's got an opportunity to realize a dream, so she tells Cricket it's time for him to go into memory care.

This is a crisis for Cricket, and like dementia crises reveal the real stuff you're made of. Cricket knows how much her dad loves the family home on its pond, and how even as he fades from reality he will be unhappy away from there. She has to decide: Does she go home and face her ugly, scarring moment to allow her sister to chase a dream and help her dad have a peaceful transition into the long night, or does she protect herself?

You know which she chooses, or there'd be no story. The point is we are with her, we see her take stock; we get to think it through with her. This is superb book-club fiction! HOURS of discussion on this topic; on the way Cricket approaches this shifting role in her family; on what Life has to throw at us.

As Arthur's gift of prophecy emerges, it is sufficiently ambiguous that I wondered each time he uttered something, "is this real? is it a statistical fluke, or a real compensation for losing the past and slipping away from the present?" I never fully settled on an answer. This felt, the more I reflected on it, like a feature not a bug. It was ambiguous enough that I could decide case-by-case how Arthur himself, as he once was, would've seen it. Cricket is in the path of the hurricane so does not immediately see the path Arthur's...seeing...is setting her on. This felt so real to me. This might be the single strongest reason I rate this book so highly. We the reader are on the journey with Cricket the whole time. I was invested in her reality from start to the culminating, freeing finish.

The lovely interplay of life-events with the effectively evoked natural world of their Adirondack home gave Arthur a frame that really made his decline...doable...for the reader. It could easily, and fairly, have been played for the devastating, awful disappearance it is. The truth of dementia's cruel excisions is not downplayed or soft-pedaled. It is counterpointed with the natural world's cycles, and those are related to Arthur and his love of the place he has lived his long life.

Adults reinventing themselves in response to family crises will always command my attention, though not always a high recommendation. Cricket's journey does the latter because she redefines herself as caretaker, as daughter, and as survivor with the hesitancy and the fearful, tearful end of life of the force of nature that was her father. Arthur was a big man, he will leave big shoes, and Cricket will now have the vision and the tools to avoid tripping over them as she moves into her new life.

Strongly recommended. Any content warnings are spoilers.