October 17th
1:30-2:30pm
Central Library – Community Room 302

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Dr. Nathaniel Chin and Robert Kolker will join in conversation about two families’ journeys tackling the impact and influence of dementia on their loved ones’ lives. Approaching the topic from varying perspectives—from medical to journalistic—Chin’s When Memory Fades and Kolker’s The Vanishing Family speak to the scientific, emotional, and social tolls of this complex disease.

In conversation with WPR host, Lee Rayburn.

When Memory Fades: What to Expect at Every Stage, from Early Signs to Full Support for Alzheimer’s and Dementia is clear, smart, and cuts through the understandable impulse to deny symptoms and grasp at ineffective treatments. From the first concerns that something might be wrong right through to the toughest stages of the disease, When Memory Fades provides granular information and frames topics that help readers figure out how to think about what’s happening.

In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road. This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.

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