Everything Left to Remember
My Mother, Our Memories, and a Journey Through the Rocky Mountains
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle." - Publishers Weekly
Between Two Kingdoms meets Wild. In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are.
Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it.
Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming.
A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jagger (Unbound) offers a beautiful reflection on love, memory, and inheritance in this heartrending account of a road trip she took through Big Sky Country, one "my mother will never remember and a journey I'll never forget." After her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2015, Jagger planned a camping trip for the two of them in Montana. Jagger's prose enchants as she chronicles the stunning natural landscapes they encountered in the state's mountains and plains, and the internal reckoning she wrestled with regarding her family's legacy: "My grandmother had dementia. My mother has Alzheimer's. I am a sapling inside of a forest that seems hell-bent on forgetting." Also present is the frustration Jagger felt as she guided her mother through terrain unfamiliar to them both—"My mother was losing her mind and I was losing my patience." While it's a somber tale—made more immediate against the collapse of the natural world ("Will we still call it Glacier National Park when it no longer has any glaciers? Will I still call her my mother when she no longer knows she has daughters?")—it's one that readers will have a hard time forgetting. This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle.
Customer Reviews
breathtaking
this book took my breath away and brought me to tears many times. I found myself re-reading sentences just to take it in again. enjoyed every word.