It’s not the easiest story to tell, but in Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, Leavitt shares her experience of her mother’s illness with tenderness and candid pain.
“This was something so big and so sad that was happening to me,” she says. It was beyond forgetting; Leavitt’s mother lost her “ability to navigate the world, to move through space.”
“She didn’t just stop recognizing me,” Leavitt explains. “She lost her sense of what a daughter is.”
Initially, Leavitt began documenting her mother’s deterioration so she wouldn’t forget it. “But then it was important to share it, kind of like a witness: this is the horrible thing that happened to me and I was there and I’m reporting back.” Read the full review on the Xtra! Vancouver website.