AN ALPHABET FOR JOANNA

Written in the vein of Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Susannah Calahan's Brain on Fire, a riveting, life-affirming memoir about being raised in 1980s Detroit by a loving but erratic single mother who is later diagnosed with frontal-lobe dementia

Throughout her childhood in Detroit, Damian Rogers was never given a satisfactory account of the circumstances that led to her own birth: the "truth" behind the stories she was told by her mother--free-spirited, beautiful and troubled Joanna--constantly shifted, and Damian was left only with fragments (her mom's trip to California after finishing high school, a mysterious trauma and psychotic break, then a return to Detroit, pregnant) – now, as 40-something Damian struggles to cope with Joanna's early-onset dementia, she realizes she may never know the full story

At once a rich memoir of an unconventional and wildly dysfunctional childhood, an engrossing medical mystery, a subtle meditation on mental illness, a celebration of the power of art, and a poignant mother-daughter saga, An Alphabet for Joanna is an exploration of how memory shifts and shapes our intimate relationships