Conversations with My Mother tells the tender and heartbreaking story of a son watching his mother fade into dementia. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I started writing the book after a weeklong stay with my mother, during which she’d been diagnosed with vascular dementia. Afraid that the mother I’d known was fast disappearing, I began visiting and calling her as often as possible. Consequently, from her initial diagnosis through her passing several years later, I periodically witnessed both firsthand and at a remove her growing disorientation and anxiety as well as her increasing bursts of candor and flights of fancy. It was this on-again, off-again exposure to the effects of her condition that led to the episodic construction of the book, whose chapters recount particular days or moments in the course of the heroine’s long and debilitating illness.

Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your character’s life?

Since Conversations With My Mother is a kind of fictionalized memoir, many of the narrator Rob’s emotions and perceptions reflect my own. From 70 to 80 percent of the book’s events are based on memories, though some were melded or otherwise modified to support its narrative and thematic development.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The book’s central theme is that loss is not always as complete as it might seem. Though a dementia victim’s personality may fade or shatter, fragments of it often remain, and we should do our best to recognize, respect, and cherish them, however few.

Another important theme is the disparity between a geographically distant offspring’s experience of a parent’s dementia and that of an offspring who is a caregiver and, as such, in constant contact with the parent. For example, the book’s narrator, Rob, lives several states away from his mother, so he experiences her decline only in periodic phone calls and visits, whereas his sister, Diane, her primary caregiver, experiences its consequences daily. This leads to a difference in perspective between the two, with Rob being more focused on the emotional and Diane on the practical. Rob, from his insulated remove, occasionally glosses over or sentimentalizes issues, which is easy to do from a distance, while Diane, being in the thick of caregiving, sometimes feels overwhelmed and becomes impatient, which is understandable, given the demanding, continuous nature of caregiving. Neither perspective is more valid than the other. Each is simply the result of the character’s particular circumstances.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when is that book due out?

My next book is a family saga describing the experiences of a French-Canadian immigrant woman from the dawn of the 20th century through the 1980s, contrasting her early life’s poverty and hardships with the different challenges faced by her more affluent children and grandchildren. Like Conversations with My Mother, it’s based on my family’s history, drawing on the experiences of both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. I expect it to be ready for publication sometime in 2027.

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