Flak Magazine: Review of Hard to Forget, 04-22-00

Charlie Pierce's first book, "Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story," will probably appeal to an audience of thirty-somethings and older. They are the generations that most often grapple with the ravages of Alzheimer's. They are the ones whose parents disappear before their eyes. They are the ones whose spouses fade into strangers in a matter of months. And they are the ones who wonder: "Will I forget my children's faces? Will I lose my way to the liquor store? Do I have the genes too?"

Pierce knows the wide swath Alzheimer's carves through families. He wrote "Hard to Forget" not only to explore his own experience with Alzheimer's, but also to present a contemporary analysis of cutting-edge research into the disease. The book's dual purpose — autobiography on the one hand, and journalism on the other — separates it from most other memoirs on the shelves. It instructs on a personal level and informs on a scientific level. For anyone dealing with Alzheimer's, Pierce's personal insights and the information he provides should prove comforting.

The seminal image in "Hard to Forget" is that of Pierce's father, out on a quick jaunt to the local florist in central Massachusetts, lost and disoriented three days later in Montpelier, Vermont. The police assume he is drunk, and lock him up. Pierce and his wife Margaret go to retrieve him. On the way back, they stop at McDonald's. Pierce tells his father that Margaret is pregnant. Pierce's father thinks he is being accused of impregnating the nice lady beside him, and he nearly runs from the restaurant.

Pierce's writing is straightforward. He lets the subject speak for itself, without any of the masterful styling he is capable of. The scenes involving Pierce's father are moving. We watch his father prevaricate to hide his faltering sensibilities, and then we watch him lose touch with reality altogether. Pierce avoids melodrama or self-pity as he describes his inability to confront the disease. He avoids the "tell-all" sentimentality that make some memoirs gush like a teenage girl's diary.

More than half of "Hard to Forget" deals with Alzheimer's research, which only underscores its pragmatic purpose. Pierce plainly conveys the excitement (and sometimes jealousy) generated from breakthrough discoveries in the field. He explains how one discovery complements another and how they tie different fields of research together. The competitiveness researchers display toward one another is almost comical, if it were not for the seriousness of their pursuit.

If the book suffers from anything, though, it is an abundance of basic scientific information that almost anyone should know nowadays. Pierce could have shortened a lengthy explanation of Johann Mendel's genetic experiments on pea plants. He links Darwin's research, to Mendel's research, to Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, to contemporary Alzheimer's research. Perhaps the history lesson will be useful to older readers, but to the rest of us, it's a section we can skip.

By the end of the book, we long for a return to the personal, and Pierce gives it to us. He travels to Ireland — a gift from his wife for his 40th birthday. There he discovers one of his father's cousins, who takes him to a graveyard where two Pierces were buried without monuments many years ago.

"There should be a monument to mark the beginning of things," Pierce writes, "for memory's sake, before everyone forgets them."

— Ben Welch (bwelch@english.umass.edu)