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Title: The Long Hello
Subtitle: Memory, My Mother, and Me
Author: Cathie Borrie
Narrator: Jill Tucker, Cathie Borrie
Format: Unabridged
Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-29-17
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs
Publisher's Summary:
A powerful, ground-shifting account of caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, about which Maya Angelou exclaimed, "Joy!"
Since Cathie Borrie delivered her keynote performance at the World Alzheimer's Day event sponsored by the Community and Access Programs of the Museum of Modern Art, her self-published manuscript has won rapturous praise from noted writers and Alzheimer's experts alike, from Maya Angelou, Lisa Genova, and Molly Peacock to Dr. Bill Thomas; Jed A. Levine of the Alzheimer's Association, NYC; and Meryl Comer of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative. Now it is available to the general public for the first time in a trade edition.
The Long Hello distills the seven years the author spent caring for her mother into a pause-resisting memoir that offers insight into the "altering world of the dementia mind". During that time Borrie recorded brief conversations she had with her mother that revealed the transformations within - and sometimes yielded an almost Zen-like poetry. She includes selections from them in chapters about her experience that are as evocative as diary entries. Her mother was the emotional pillar and sometime breadwinner in a home touched by a birth father's alcoholism, a brother's early death, divorce, and a stepfather's remoteness. In Borrie's spare prose, her mother's story becomes a family's story as well a deeply loving portrait that embraces life.
Members Reviews:
A Wonderful and Joyous Celebration of Love between Mum and Daughter!
The Long Hello: Memory, My Mother and Me is an exquisitely-written memoir from author Cathie Borrie that contains amazing and witty insights from Ms. Borrie's Mum; made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Ms. Borrie's Mum is living with Alzheimer's Disease at the time these thoughts were recorded. I find myself reading this wonderful book many times as the joy and love between Mum and daughter are clearly evident in its pages. Also evident in these pages is the clear fact that even though Ms. Borrie's mother, Jo, may have lost her ability to remember recent events, Jo never lost her personality and ability to maintain a loving relationship with her daughter. This book is so very warm, wonderful and full of wisdom from Jo to her daughter Cathie to all of us and serves as a great reminder that while Alzheimer's Disease may take some aspects of our relationships with our loved ones, it can allow us to see and experience so much more richness and love.
I wish this book had been free.
This was the first book I've ever read that I couldn't wait for it to be over and done with. I almost stopped reading it several times because it jumped all over the place and was so incredibly hard to follow. Half the time I couldn't figure out if she was talking about her own thoughts or her mother's ramblings. The jumping from the recent days to her childhood and back was distracting and irritating. I did not enjoy having to constantly try to figure out where the author was going in her narrative. It wasn't informative, other than describing how muddled an Alzheimer's patient's mind gets. That could have been accomplished in one short chapter.
I read for enjoyment or education. This book was neither.
A Beautiful Work of Art
This book is a beautiful literary work about the human experience and family.