Sue Eugène

2003 · réf. 2348982 — New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2003. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Near Fine. 5x0x5. Signed by author. First edition. Signed by author without inscription on title page. Minimal wear to corners. 2003 Hard Cover. 173 pp. In the fall of 1988 Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was she claims perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life. With compassion self-scrutiny and an urgency born of her own yearning to rescue her father's memory from the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death Sue Miller takes us on an intensely personal journey that becomes by virtue of her enormous gifts of observation perception and literary precision a universal story of fathers and daughters. James Nichols was a fourth-generation minister a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sue Miller brings her father brilliantly to life in these pages-his religious faith his endless patience with his children his gaiety and willingness to delight in the ridiculous his singular gifts as a listener and the rituals of church life that stayed with him through his final days. She recalls the bitter irony of watching him a church historian wrestle with a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time history and meaning. She recounts her struggle with doctors her deep ambivalence about many of her own choices and the difficulty of finding continually the humane and moral response to a disease whose special cruelty it is to dissolve particularities and to diminish in so many ways the humanity of those it strikes. She reflects unforgettably on the variable nature of memory the paradox of trying to weave a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. And she offers stunning insight into her own life as both a daughter and a writer two roles that swell together here in a poignant meditation on the consolations of storytelling. With the care restraint and consummate skill that define her beloved and best-selling fiction Sue Miller now gives us a rigorous compassionate inventory of two lives in a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling-as we all eventually must-to make peace with their fathers and with themselves. Alfred A. Knopf hardcover books