The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting » (Unabridged)

With the selection of The House on Beartown Road -- a poignant chronicle of her experience caring for both an infant child and a father with Alzheimer's -- as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, journalist Elizabeth Cohen is poised to become a writer that will long be remembered in readers' hearts.

In this beautiful book, Elizabeth Cohen gives us a true and moving portrait of the love and courage of a family.

Elizabeth, a member of the sandwich generation people caught in the middle, simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents is the mother of Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and responsible for both. Hers is the story of a woman s struggle to keep her family whole, to raise her child in a house of laughter and love, and to keep her father from hiding the house keys in his slippers.

In this story full of everyday triumphs, first steps, and elderly confusion, Ava, a baby, finds each new picture, each new word, each new song, something to learn greedily, joyfully. Daddy is a man in his twilight years for whom time moves slowly and lessons are not learned but quietly, frustratingly forgotten. Elizabeth, a suddenly single mother with a career and a mortgage and a hamper of laundry, finds her world spiraling out of control yet full of beauty. Faced with mounting disasters, she chooses to confront life head-on.

Written in wonderful prose and imbued with an unquenchable spirit, The House on Beartown Road takes us on a journey through the remarkable landscape that is family.

The New York Times

Instead of molding all this into 270 pages of scathing retribution or bitter self-pity, Cohen has written a frank, funny and unexploitative memoir. She is not shy about detailing her father's Alzheimer's, but she's equally intent on illuminating his dignity. Indeed, the disease's cruel habit of eating away at memory made her determined to understand better the man who now depends on her for his existence. And though she doesn't glamorize Alzheimer's, she's not blind to its occasional heartbreaking beauty. — Maggie Jones