San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
An honest look at Alzheimer’s
If you’ve ever been a caregiver for a loved one who has dementia or Alzheimer’s, you know the experience is horrific.
It might begin with a forgotten name, a set of misplaced keys.
The effects of the disease might then progress to forgetting to pay the electric bill, getting lost on the way home from the grocery store or Postit notes tacked up around the house (“Use the blue toothbrush.” “This is your house.” “Your wife is Louise.”)
At its worst, witnessing someone suffering from latestage Alzheimer’s is like watching the thorough dismantling of a person in real time. In addition to the repetitive conversations and blank stares, there are the bedsores, the painful constipation, the violent outbursts.
As 38yearold Edie, the protagonist in San Francisco native Rebecca Handler’s devastating debut novel puts it, “He stopped being himself and I guess we stopped being ourselves. I stopped being myself. He had disappeared completely in the end. It had taken everything out of him. I mean, I guess he was still my dad. But not really.”
But though “Edie Richter Is Not Alone” documents the trauma of illness and the ravaging effects it has on Edie’s family with such honesty and accuracy that it made my ribs ache, it’s more a book about what happens next — after the shocking act that ends Edie’s 63yearold father’s misery and bifurcates her life into Before and After. (Spoiler alert: She suffocates him and tells no one about how he died.) When her husband Oren gets a yearlong job transfer to Perth, Australia, on the heels of her father’s death, Edie jumps at the chance to start afresh. Shortly after her father’s funeral, she and Oren hop on a plane, move into a quaint new home Down Under and try to piece their lives back together.
As Edie soon learns, of course, she can’t outtravel her past nor her pain. What begins as periodic flashbacks to her childhood coupled with repressed guilt about her dad soon transforms into terrifying nightmares involving puppies being forcefed, erratic behavior toward her neighbors and the slow deterioration of her marriage.
“I thought that life was about moving from one thing to another, all the previous things falling down behind you, but I was beginning to see this was not the case at all. That in fact every action, every thought, and every word uttered, they all stayed with you and formed a sort of jumbled collage,” Handler writes.
When witnessing a character’s steady and stubborn descent into full breakdown mode, it can be tempting for readers to judge the quality of a book based on said character’s poor decisions or bad behavior. Too often we throw away a novel because we deem its protagonist to be “unrelatable,” or worse, “unlikable.”
In this case, “Edie Richter Is Not Alone” blossoms under the weight of Edie’s crisis. Yes, her selfishness is unpalatable at times. (An examination of whether her actions are justifiable could take up a whole other review.) But it’s also what makes her human.
It may seem counterintuitive to pick up a novel about death and grief when so many people are suffering at this moment in history. (More sadness? No thanks!)
What Handler’s book teaches us is that facing tragedy headon and accepting death as a constant are the only ways to get through it. Plus, reading about or sharing someone else’s pain teaches us empathy.
No, Edie Richter wasn’t alone in her anxiety, her sorrow or attempts to heal, though she felt like it most of the time. Though all of us probably believe the opposite right now in this age of elbow bumps and quarantines, neither are we.